


Remembering Molly

by GreenGoth



Series: The Monrosalee Chronicles [4]
Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: F/M, Monroe's past relationships and family life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 16:25:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12193479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenGoth/pseuds/GreenGoth
Summary: Monroe/Rosalee - a letter from his mother sends Monroe spiraling down a traumatic memory lane about his high school girlfriend Molly and what might have been except for the abusive Klaustreich who stole her away and ruined her life, leading teenage Monroe on the first menschenjagd (manhunt) of his life.  Inspired by Monroe's 2:30 AM phone call from Nick in "The Thing with Feathers" (Season 1.16) when Nick is trying to identify the cat-like Wesen tormenting his spouse next door to the cabin where Nick & Juliette are trying to have a romantic getaway.Disclaimer:  Grimm TV show is owned by Universal/NBC and show's creators, not me!  I just love to play with its characters & universe.  The OCs (Molly & her family, Travis the Klaustreich) are my creations for personal & fellow fan enjoyment only.





	Remembering Molly

**Author's Note:**

> Hoping I'm not the only one who loves to go romping off imagining what the early lives of our beloved Grimm characters might have been like! Thanks to the Internet, I stalked Monroe's childhood home in Halfmoon Lake, New Hampshire...anyone more familiar with the real place, please advise me of corrections/embellishments you'd like to see. Please let me know if you enjoyed this, as I've enjoyed so many other writers' Grimm stories here!

REMEMBERING MOLLY

Monroe’s early life -- what might have been…and what really happened

Monroe tells the story of his first Menschenjagd to Rosalee – vengeance/justice for his high school sweetheart Molly, seduced, impregnated, abandoned & slashed by the Klaustreich delinquent who stole her away from Monroe in senior year & ruined her life. (Reference Monroe’s phone conversation at 2:30 am w/Nick in “The Thing W/Feathers”, Season 1) This story takes place in September 2014, 5 months after Monroe & Rosalee are married but before the Wesenrein kidnap Monroe on the eve of their belated honeymoon and Juliette becomes a Hexenbiest.

******

The bungalow was unusually dark and quiet when Rosalee struggled through the front door juggling grocery bags, her purse, apothecary kit and a UPS box that had been left on the porch. That was unusual in itself; Monroe always brought packages straight into the house as soon as they were delivered. He had to be home, she thought, his car was in the driveway and the rarely used bicycle was still on the porch. Maybe he’d needed to get out for a walk to rest his eyes and unkink from too many hours bent over his workbench focused on tiny, intricate clock parts.

She left the box on his workbench, hung her coat on its hook in the hallway behind the stairs and carried the rest through to the shadowy kitchen, depositing the canvas grocery bags on the counter.

There was one lamp on in the living room. Her husband of five months sat on the couch in its golden pool of light, legs outstretched and ankles crossed, holding a handwritten letter and its envelope in his lap. He was so completely lost in thought he hadn’t noticed her homecoming beyond a subconscious awareness that she belonged; her entry posed no threat.

“Monroe?” She stood in the doorway between the dining and living rooms, having dropped her purse and apothecary bag on the table. “Sorry I’m late, I had a house call on the way home. Did you get my text?” She peered at him through the gloom. “Are you okay?”

He blinked and shook his head slightly, coming out of his trance. “Mmm, sorry. I’m fine. Just, way lost down Memory Lane.” He waved the letter in his hand. “From my mom.”

“She has to be one of the few people left who writes actual pen-and-ink letters on formal stationery any more.” Rosalee came over to the couch and gazed down at the neat cursive filling both sides of four pages of pale green paper bordered with snow-laden conifers.

“They’re totally old school, I keep saying.” He smiled and slid the pages partway back into the envelope with its handwritten New Hampshire return address.

“So, what did she write that had you so lost to the world?”

He let out a short breath and gave a brief quirky smile. “The usual, family and neighborhood gossip, complaining about the fall onslaught of leaf-peeper tourists, and Dad insisting on renewing his hunting license.”

Rosalee made her way around the coffee table to settle on the couch beside him, looking askance at the letter. “His hunting license? Really?”

“In case he ever has to explain all the venison and…other things in the game freezer in the garage.”

“So they’re still…?”

“Apparently.” He shook his head with a rueful smile. “I suppose it could just be the cousins or nieces and nephews sharing, but somehow I doubt it.”

“Wow. And I thought they were, ah, retired.”

“Only sort of, from anything. Mom still substitutes at the high school where she taught math and science all those years; they value the way she controls a classroom full of rowdy adolescents. The kids learn real fast that you don’t disrespect a Blutbad woman. Not that they know why she’s so…formidable. But they get the message.” He laughed shortly. “Used to be, kids would find out they were assigned to her classes and they’d be throwing up before the first day of school, based on her reputation. And those were just the Kehrseiten who didn’t know what she is. Imagine the Wesen kids!”

“But your dad?”

“Kind of partner emeritus in his construction company. Consults on special projects, advises on bids, that sort of thing. He’s still tinkering with clocks in his shop, though. Seems to be a hereditary obsession.” He sighed heavily, gaze falling on the letter again. “And she had news about Molly.”

“Who’s Molly?” Rosalee tucked her feet up under her, curious to hear more about his extended family back in Halfmoon Lake. He rarely talked about them in any detail. She got the sense that the separation was necessary but painful for him; he missed them but not their old ways that could embroil him in so much trouble.

“Molly Adler, my high school girlfriend. Actually, she was a lot more than that. We were best friends from about, oh, second grade, after we both grew out of the ‘girls have cooties’ and ‘boys are gross’ stages. We were just two nerdy, peculiar kids who found out we had a lot of shared interests that nobody else our age cared about. And our families hunted together, so between that and school we were around each other a lot.”

“So she’s Blutbad?”

“Yeah, though probably the most mild mannered, least aggressive Blutbad I’ve ever known. Her family always thought she’d turn out to be a research librarian or museum curator or something like that. If only.” He sighed heavily again, gaze unfocused.

“I sense a serious story coming on,” Rosalee said gently. “And I do want to hear it. But I’d better go put those groceries away before things start to melt and wilt. What about dinner?”

“In the oven. I made quiche. Just need to throw a salad together, open some wine.” He was still staring past the letter, lost in memories.

She patted his arm as she unfolded herself from the couch. “Are you hungry?”

“I should be. I guess.” This, from the man with the notoriously healthy appetite.

“I’m ravenous. Not a bite since noon, and that was just a turkey wrap on the run between customers. We should eat; it’s getting late, we’re kind of off schedule.” She knew how he needed and valued his routines.

“Okay.” He dropped the letter on the coffee table and got up to help put things away and get dinner on the table, but she could tell he was distracted, something preying on his mind. The spinach and mushroom quiche was marvelous as always, but he was still picking at his first piece when Rosalee decided to help herself to a second.

“You’re not eating, honey. What’s eating you?” she asked with sympathy, reaching out to cover his hand with hers.

He lifted those expressive brown eyes to meet hers, and they were haunted. After a long moment, he let out a deep sigh. “I don’t talk about my past much, for good reason. I mean, not all of it was bad. Growing up, to a point, was pretty good actually. Allowing for, well, pack behavior being the norm for us, but mostly the dominant adults kept a lid on things and the mayhem to a minimum. A few notable casualties, mostly at extended family reunions when people got pissed – in both senses of the word – offense was taken and the parties involved wouldn’t back off.”

“Sounds like fun,” she said wryly. “By casualties you mean –?”

“Death and maiming. Dad said it’s one way of culling the unfit hotheads from the gene pool. Not good having young hyper-aggressive Blutbaden on the loose who can’t control their murderous impulses even in a family situation. So, yeah, we lost a couple of cousins but, ah, truth told they weren’t really missed much.” He looked aside for a moment, brow furrowed. “I think I mentioned that once…about how we missed the poor sheepdog who was collateral damage, but not the cousins?”

Rosalee nodded, pursing her full lips. “Wow. At our family gatherings we mostly drank too much and sang Irish songs till dawn while cheating each other at cards and board games.”

“How Fuchsbau is that?” He cracked a smile that warmed her to see.

“Hey, the rule of honor is you cheat with your opponent directly in front of you; you don’t pull something if they leave the room for a minute during the game. There’s no sport in that.” She grinned back at him, pleased when he took another bite of his quiche.

“Yeah, remind me never to play poker with you. I’d like to see you take on Hank and Wu, though. That would be good fun.”

“What about Nick?”

“He’s too restless, can’t sit still and focus long enough. I watched them take him to the cleaners several times when they came over while he was staying here. Guess card games just can’t hold his interest with all his cop and Grimm stuff going on. Same with watching hockey or soccer. Bud and I just gave up on him, let him drift through, watch a few minutes, scarf up some snacks and wander off with his beer. Most times he wasn’t even aware of which teams were playing.”

“I’m not sure I’d want to sit across a card table looking into those eyes for very long, though. It would definitely put me off my game.” She cocked her head and considered, one eyebrow lowered. “Maybe not, though. Could be an interesting challenge. But Hank and Wu – bring it on!”

“Fine. I’d keep the refreshments coming and referee as necessary. Throw Bud in as a wild card; he talks so much he totally distracts everybody but he’s a wicked card player. He never loses track of his game and what cards everybody else has or hasn’t played. Apparently they have some world class card sharps down at the Lodge.”

“I never would have imagined.” She envisioned a community hall full of Eisbibers hunched around card tables, green eyeshades pulled low and all talking a mile a minute.

“Yeah, he doesn’t cheat – totally honorable. He’s just very, very good.” He looked down at his empty plate. “Guess I was hungry after all.”

“Good. Let’s clear all this away and take our wine out to the living room, and you can tell me about Molly. That is what’s bothering you, isn’t it?”

His smile faded and he let out a short breath, nodding twice. “Yeah. But I’m not sure I want to, or should. We’ve said no secrets between us, but some things, I don’t know. There’s such a thing as too much information.” He looked over at her beneath lowered brows and a quirk of a smile that quickly faded. “TMI” was her code for when he was going way overboard with his detailed descriptions of something he was hyper-enthused or agitated about.

“Well, if it’s eating at you this much and you can’t help brooding about it till you’re oblivious of your surroundings, I’d say you probably need to share it with me.”

“You might think twice about staying with someone who…has this kind of history.”

“It can’t be any worse than what you told me about running wild in the Cascades for a month with Angelina doing god-knows-what that you can’t even remember clearly involving a lot of blood and body parts, but are very glad you were never caught.”

“There’s that,” he acknowledged. “Okay. I’ll try.”

He was quiet and thoughtful while they put the leftovers away and cleaned the kitchen. Monroe was not one to leave so much as a used coffee spoon in the sink or a kitchen towel hung crooked on its ring. They took their glasses of sauvignon blanc back to the living room, Rosalee snagging the rest of the bottle from the fridge on her way, just in case.

He settled in the corner of the couch by the lamp, picking up Alice’s letter, and she snuggled up against him, shoes off and feet tucked under her again. He clinked his wine glass lightly against hers.

“Here goes.” They sipped and she waited. “You know I’m an only; I never mentioned there were older siblings who didn’t make it past childhood for various unhappy reasons, but essentially I grew up in a one-child home. Early on, Molly was like the sister I never had, I guess like a twin sister since we were the same age and had so many of the same quirks. We played at school and whenever our families got together, did homework and school projects together, shared hobbies. Really nerded-out together. She was over at our house a lot after school and on weekends to the point Mom pretty much automatically set four places at the table when Molly was visiting.”

He was turning the green envelope over and over in his hands, reliving those relatively happy and innocent years.

“The Adlers had a houseful of kids, most of them and the parents loud, enthusiastic, boisterous German-American types; the four boys all shared a bedroom and the three girls had theirs, so Molly wasn’t used to having any peaceful space of her own. I guess we were kind of a sanctuary for her, since she was so quiet and introverted by nature.

“Her family loved her dearly, don’t get me wrong. They just didn’t understand her or realize how lost she could feel in that lively household. And they knew she was safe and welcome at our house, so no problem there. Mrs. Adler would tell Mom, ‘As long as she’s not a burden; you let me know if she’s wearing out her welcome,’ whenever Mom would call and ask if Molly could stay for lunch or dinner.”

“What did she look like?” Rosalee asked. “I’m trying to form a picture of her in my mind.” She was surprised when Monroe winced with pain and averted his eyes. “Was there something wrong with her?” she asked carefully.

“No. No, she was a cute auburn-haired girl, tendency to freckle, blue eyes, long lashes…not that I noticed all that when we were kids. On the small side for her age, kind of gangly and tomboyish, but absolutely fearless when we’d be out in the forest, climbing trees, swimming in the lake, clambering over boulders in the streams.”

“Climbing trees? Is that really a Blutbad thing?”

“Not so much, except early on she got really into birding. I mean, _really_ into it, learning their songs and calls and habits, climbing way up in trees to collect abandoned nests and eggs, molted feathers. She didn’t hunt the birds themselves; she had a notebook she always carried with her to write down what birds she saw and where, date and time, weather conditions, all that.”

“She does sound like your twin sister!”

“Right? And I loved being out in the wild anyway, felt so much more at ease in the woods or down by the lake than indoors and surrounded by people. A lot of times I felt clueless about how to react to them or what they expected of me, really awkward in social situations.”

He gave Rosalee a mock-warning look when her eyes glinted and she opened her mouth to tease him. “Yes, way worse than now! Molly was the same way. Sometimes we’d talk about how hard it was to know when to make eye contact or smile or figure out the right thing to say, like we were missing cues that everyone else picked up without thinking.”

Rosalee thought privately that if Monroe and Molly were in school today, they might be considered somewhat “on the spectrum”, a possibility that had helped her work out how to connect with Monroe from the early days of their acquaintance. Or maybe it was just because they were Blutbaden and not as aggressive as most of their peers – although that had certainly changed at some point for Monroe.

“So, yeah, weekends and school vacations we’d pack lunches and just disappear all day, go hiking up the mountain trails or exploring all the different habitats along the lake shore, wander around the forests. When we got older, we’d just hunt down lunch, not bother to pack anything….” He glanced sideways at Rosalee to gauge her reaction.

“We did that with fishing…and bird nests, sorry to say. DeEtta wasn’t one for the outdoors but Freddy and I were into free-range sashimi before we knew it was a thing out in the human world.”

“Raw bird eggs? It’s a wonder you didn’t come down with salmonella.”

“That’s more a problem with birds in confinement, but yes, wild birds carry all kinds of diseases. Mom said we had immune systems like sailors.”

“Ol’ buttoned-down, vest and tie, immaculately groomed Freddy Calvert raiding bird nests and catching fish Gollum-style, scarfing it all up raw? Man, talk about your cognitive dissonance.” He shook his head, flashing a grin. “It’s gonna take me awhile to wrap my head around that one.”

“But you have no trouble imagining me doing that?’

He tilted his head back and looked down at her, eyes narrowed with mischief. “None at all.”

“Well, okay then. I’ll take that as a compliment.” It was good to see him enjoying their usual banter, but Rosalee knew he needed to talk through whatever it was about Molly that was troubling him so deeply. Regretfully, she nudged him back to his story. “So, about you and Molly?”

Monroe gazed off into the past, his smile softening but not disappearing. “I guess we were like wolf pups in our own little pack of two, running free out in nature – Halfmoon Lake _is_ in a beautiful, wild rural area – or holed up for hours totally losing track of time working on our hobbies at home. About the time we were ten, we started building this huge train table out in our bonus room in the back, the one that opened out onto the state forest?”

Rosalee nodded that she remembered his description of his childhood home.

“We were making this elaborate alpine landscape for my grandfather’s model train set to run through – the 1935 Märklin I put up now at Christmas. She was so creative and artistic; she could take the most mundane materials and craft them into mountains, lakes and forests and whole little towns, woodcutter’s cottages off by themselves, waterfalls; we even built a glacier.”

“Ooooh, do you have pictures? I wish I could see it!”

“Sure, probably somewhere up in the attic. I know Mom has some; she used to keep photo albums of holidays, Halloween costumes, camping trips, vacations, all that Mom-keepsake kind of stuff.”

Rosalee thought wistfully about pictures of Monroe as a child. “Much as I’d love to see those, I’m not likely to go visiting your parents back in New Hampshire any time soon.”

“Ah, no. Not because of them any more but, well, everybody else,” he agreed uncomfortably.

“So, this was a kind of ‘silver box’ time in your life, with Molly,” she prompted.

“The part with Molly, yes, I guess it was. Not so great trying to navigate the whole social world at school and around the neighborhood, but at the time I didn’t realize it wasn’t all that easy for anybody. It just seemed like everybody else had their place where they fit in, except us. I had a couple of buddies, kids I grew up with in the neighborhood or met through scouts and orchestra, but that was just casual guy kind of friendship, you know, hanging out, bagging on each other, but not really close.”

“Wait, orchestra? Not band….”

“You can’t march very well with a cello,” he told her with a grin. “No, soon as we were old enough, our parents pushed Molly and me to start taking music lessons and sign up for orchestra. They wanted us to get into some kind of extracurricular school activity, and neither of us was into sports or debate or drama, anything so…interactive as that. She played oboe – I know, oddballs again; neither of us went for the popular instruments like violin or flute.”

“Is there a duet for cello and oboe?” Rosalee smiled, eyes twinkling at him.

“Not really. We had to improvise, and yeah, sometimes it sounded pretty strange.” He chuckled at the memory. “Kind of like cello and zither, if I could convince you to dust the thing off and tune it.”

“Take up zither again in all my vast spare time? I don’t think so.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll keep trying. Anyway, things went along great for several years, though once we hit junior high and the joys of puberty, things started to feel kind of different between Molly and me. We didn’t talk about it; neither of us knew the other was having these odd feelings, too. And then we had this big Christmas concert; everybody required to dress up formally in black to perform on the auditorium stage. And that’s when I realized Molly looked different, when I saw her with her hair done up and that pretty long black dress that framed her neck, and…she had _breasts_ , when the hell did that happen?”

He blushed a little at the memory, though his face was animated and he was smiling, reminiscing about that long ago night. Amused, Rosalee sipped her wine, nodding.

“After that, even when we were just hanging out in our old jeans and sweaters, messing with the train table or out birding or botanizing – that’s a word, right? – I looked at her differently and couldn’t stop thinking about her even when we were apart. And I guess I was incessantly talking about her, too.” He glanced sideways at Rosalee and gave her thigh a squeeze. “Yeah, that’s always been a thing with me, I know.”

She laughed and patted his hand, entwining her fingers with his.

“But one day when I was thirteen I was having an argument with Mom and it got pretty heated – I don’t even remember what it was about, just adolescent stuff – and she got in my face and told me I needed to broaden my horizons and start thinking seriously about what I was going to do with my life, instead of spending all my time indulging in ‘puppy love’ with Molly. That’s when I saw red – literally. And _woged_ for the first time.”

“Oh, my god….”

“It totally freaked me out, hit me like…I don’t know, being inside a flame thrower. I was so mad at my mom, so hurt and insulted and shocked, and then I felt all contorted and broken, out of control, things moving under my skin that shouldn’t.” His eyes were unfocused as that life-altering moment played through his mind; his hand gripped Rosalee’s thigh. “My face and teeth changed, I bit through my lower lip and my claws tore my pants. I was all hairy and felt just wild, unhinged – and scared! I didn’t know what it was. I mean, I did, after a second, intellectually, but experientially, it’s so, so different.”

He stopped for breath, eyes wide at the intense, traumatic memory. “And Mom _woged_ right back at me, eyes all red, voice raspy and gruff. ‘Don’t you growl at me, young man! Look at yourself!’ And she spun me around to stare into the big hallway mirror and I almost passed out. I mean, serious vertigo, you know?”

“I _do_ know,” Rosalee said sincerely. She’d been waiting for this whole story since the night in the elegant Ampersand restaurant when she reluctantly told him her ‘first time’ story after he’d pressed, but only got the capsule version of his, that it happened with his mom.

“And then she walked me closer to the mirror, her arm around my shoulders – she already had to reach way up,” he said with a wry smile, “and had me take a good long look at my Blutbad self. She stayed _woged_ so I could look at her, too, in a whole new way; I mean, I’d seen my folks and aunts and uncles and older cousins _woged_ before when we were out running and hunting, and those scary confrontations at parties I told you about. But now it was just Mom and me, right there in our living room.”

Rosalee nodded, imagining this very Wesen mother and son bonding experience; of course the no-nonsense Alice would handle it this way. She felt a growing appreciation of her complicated mother-in-law.

“She was so casual and matter-of-fact, it kept me from freaking out even more. And she helped me sort through the crazy jumble of feelings and impulses and the sheer giddy excitement of it, then coached me to relax and un- _woge_. Calmly led me to the bathroom to take care of my cut lip and rinse the blood out of my shirt with cold water, like this was such an ordinary thing. I remember staring at myself in the bathroom mirror in my undershirt while she was rinsing my shirt, and my eyes went red and it happened again! Mom just sighed and said, ‘These jeans are history, go and get changed now. And I mean changed, in both senses of the word!’”

Rosalee giggled and Monroe relaxed his grip on her thigh, relieved at her amusement.

“When I came back out of my room unfurry and in fresh clothes, she was fixing dinner and beamed at me, told me, ‘Wait till your father gets home!’ I realized she was proud and happy about what had happened to me, so I started feeling a little that way, too, but still scared shitless it would happen again and I couldn’t control it, or the violent feelings that surged with it.”

“I told you about Freddy teasing me and laughing when I first  _woged_ ,” Rosalee said. “I was so scared and furious, I attacked him and took a good chunk out of his ankle, and I’d never been violent before! It was so wild, so primitive, it’s like I was nothing but pure id. And I’m just Fuchsbau, it’s hard to imagine what it was like for you!”

“Puppy love,” Monroe mused. “Boy, did she hit a nerve. A lot of them, actually, feelings I hadn’t recognized or admitted to myself. I was embarrassed and worried; I didn’t want to risk my friendship with Molly but I couldn’t lie to myself about those feelings any more. Typical teenage panic – what if she didn’t have feelings like that for me? And I had no reason to think she did.”

“So, so hard, risking your best friend,” Rosalee commiserated. “And my best guy friend I was crushing on was Kehrseite. He had _no idea_.”

“Oh, wow, that’s…awkward.”

“I was so excited about my new secret and I couldn’t tell him, much less show him, or my girlfriends. Up till then I was trying so hard to just be normal, pretend I wasn’t something so different from the rest of them. So they all thought I was acting weird all the sudden, and I probably was. Teenagers are the worst about that stuff. My friends knew something major had happened to me and started teasing me, then getting all bitchy when I wouldn’t, couldn’t tell them what it was, and after awhile they shut me out of the clique. And Andy started acting all squirrelly around me, like he kind of wanted to be with me but was also kind of afraid. “

“His antennas must have been humming, picking up the Other but no way to understand what it was.”

“So I was crying in my room again for the umpteenth time one evening and my mom sat me down and gave me The Talk about why we need to stick with our own kind, why it doesn’t work to be boyfriend/girlfriend with Kehrseiten.” She shook her head at the emotions welling up with that memory. “Wow, that was decades ago and those feelings come back so strong.”

“Yeah, that talk came later for me. Mom and Dad were just relieved I was smitten with Molly and not some other species – sorry – or worse, a Kehrseite girl, especially because we were still so nerdy and socially immature. So instead I got the stern lecture about always being a gentleman and respecting women, and to restrain myself with Molly, when I was barely able to admit I felt romantic – OK, and sexual attraction to her. I mean, the sex lecture was probably the most excruciating talk Dad ever had with me, until years later when I told them about committing to the whole wieder vegetarian/drugs/Pilates/no-hunting thing. I thought they’d both swallow their tongues and fall down in a common fit – which they almost did – but I digress.”

“Yes, you do, but it’s fascinating,” Rosalee assured him. She put down her wine glass and moved into his lap, caressing his face, running her fingers through his adorably scruffy beard.

“And you’re distracting.” He closed his arms around her and nuzzled into her neck, breathing in her subtle, intoxicating foxy scent. “Exactly the kind of woman my mother warned me about.”

“Mmm, we’ll come back to that.” She rested her head on his chest, sensing that it would be easier for him to talk about this if she wasn’t looking into his eyes. “So you were having these new feelings for Molly….”

He rubbed her back absently, silent for a moment, remembering, then resumed his story. “Yeah, well, very slowly, and very carefully, we started kind of testing each other out, just the ways our eyes would meet, hands would brush while we were messing with the train set, or sit closer together watching stuff on TV. We didn’t talk about it, just kind of found our way into it. You remember, the thrill of just resting your hand on the other’s back, the playful teasing like we were little kids again, the long, serious conversations about – ”

“Life, the universe and everything?” Rosalee joked lightly, referencing their mutual enjoyment of the works of Douglas Adams.

“Yeah, everything _but_ ….” Monroe said, widening his eyes.

“Everything but,” she agreed. “And being so obsessed but not able to tell him, so afraid I was reading it wrong and he didn’t feel that way, even though my friends could see it and teased me about it.”

“Oh, yeah. That.”

“I was so worried that if I made the first move, he’d look at me like I was crazy and reject me, and I’d feel like such an idiot thinking he liked me that way and be so humiliated.”

“All of that!”

“And Monroe, all of that is so utterly, awfully _human_ , you know?”

“I know now, but then it was all…uncharted territory. Plus the, uh, Blutbad thing.”

“Like any of us needed another – huge – complication!”

“Still, she was the first one outside my immediate family I told about _woging_ , and I was thrilled and shy and anxious all at the same time when she asked me to show her.”

“That is _major_.”

“Seriously. So we went off into the woods to one of our favorite spots for privacy and she sat down on a big, flat boulder that stuck out into the stream and looked at me and waited, this little expectant smile on her lips. But at first I couldn’t do it; couldn’t generate the emotion to bring out the wild thing. And then she leaned forward and said, ‘Do it for me, Monroe.’”

“Oh, god,” Rosalee groaned, covering her face with her hand.

“And whoosh! That sparked the fire, I can tell you, but in a whole different way than before.”

“I’m familiar with that one,” Rosalee purred and licked lightly behind his ear.

Monroe laughed raggedly, arms closing around her more tightly. “Keep that up and it’s going to happen right here.”

“Okay, I’ll wait till after the story.”

Mood shifting, he gave a heavy sigh. “Neither of us may feel like it after that. It’s not exactly a happy ending.”

“Sorry.” She hugged him and stroked his hair, her head resting on his shoulder. “I should have guessed, the way you reacted to Alice’s letter.”

They were quiet for a while, holding each other and taking comfort in their silence and the steady ticking of myriad clocks. Then he spoke again softly.

“So, I _woged_ , and all I could think of, not very coherently, was how much I wanted to rush over there and wrap my arms around her like this,” squeezing Rosalee tighter, “and kiss her, leaving no doubt. But I had doubt. Until she _woged_ right back at me, eyes glowing red, beautiful reddish brown fur, glistening fangs yet kind of smiling. She’d _woged_ for the first time before I did, and she’d been secretly waiting for me. I mean, girls do tend to mature earlier, right?”

“Among our kinds, yeah.”

“So, ‘puppy love’ it was. We kind of awkwardly kissed and made out a little, neither of us much knowing what we were doing. In human form, of course, the other was way too scary.”

“Much safer, and easier to – navigate?”

Monroe chuckled. “One way to put it. So after that, we didn’t hide that we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Didn’t make any announcement of course, but just let it be known by doing things like holding hands at school, walking along with our thumbs hooked in each other’s belt loops behind our backs, all those hokey, thrilling things back in those more innocent days.”

“I really feel sorry for kids so drowned in all the over-sexualized media today who never go through all those sweet, tiny baby steps discovering each other. It’s all so blatant today, moves so fast.”

“We’re dinosaurs, Rosalee.”

“I know. Sometimes I think we’re nearly extinct!” They laughed and she turned in his lap to rest her forehead against his, arms around his neck, sensing that the distressing part of the story was coming. “And after that?”

“After that, it was fine until senior year. We were just one of those disgusting, devoted high school sweetheart couples who did everything together, but were still chaste – enough, you know. Do they still call it heavy petting?”

Rosalee giggled again and fingered his shirt collar. “I seriously doubt it.”

“Well, our families were real traditional, so…no taking chances. Our parents would’ve been perfectly happy if we’d gotten married right after high school and gone off to college together. Could’ve happened. But, no.” Monroe couldn’t keep the snarl out of his voice. “ _He_ came along.”

Rosalee went still; the playfulness drained out of her. “He….”

“Klaustreich kid. Held back a couple times so a little older than most of us, in and out of juvie and foster care, placed with a local foster home not long after school started that fall. ‘Nothing but tight pants and attitude’, the way my mom described him. He flunked out of her classes real fast; she wouldn’t put up with his crap and wouldn’t let him disrupt class for her other students. He made it real clear he didn’t give a damn about school; he was just waiting till he was old enough to legally bail out of the system. All kinds of bad-boy buzz around him; he stalked around campus like testosterone on steroids – does that make sense?”

“Only too much.”

“So while he was stuck there, he amused himself by playing the girl students. He was way worse than Elvis Greenspan, the Ziegevolk kid. Elvis never pursued Molly, or for that matter any of the Wesen girls; we were all onto him, what he was, and he sure didn’t want a pack of pissed-off Blutbaden or pride of Löwen coming to his family’s door looking for retribution. But we couldn’t exactly warn the Kehrseiten against him in any useful way, either, so…but still, Elvis was relatively harmless compared to this tomcat.”

“He went after Molly,” Rosalee guessed, her heart sinking.

“After he tired of his willing entourage. Guess he wanted more of a challenge. Or just couldn’t stand innocent, naïve people being happy.” He sighed deeply, rocking her side to side on his lap. “I never saw it coming. Neither did Molly. All the sudden this big noise on campus is paying her all kinds of attention, telling her how beautiful and sexy and unappreciated she is, inviting her to the wrong kinds of parties, sweeping her in with his dubious class of ‘friends’. Nobody’d ever given her that kind of attention before; we were way below the radar of the ‘popular’ kids, never even looked at anyone else let alone dated them.

“At first she was just annoyed and kind of creeped out, but after awhile some of the flattery and intro into the social world we’d never been part of piqued her curiosity; she said she just wanted to see what it was like, it was probably the only time in her life she could test it out a little before settling for safe and familiar. Which meant me.”

“Oww.”

“Yeah. He was her walk on the wild side, the dangerous guy, the tall, dark, sexy mysterious stranger.”

“But you’re a dangerous guy!”

“Not then I wasn’t; not to Molly. She started spending more and more time with him and his crowd, lost interest in our hobbies and school; she dropped out of orchestra two weeks before our big holiday performance and she was the only oboist, not that she’d been practicing much lately anyway.

“It took the Adlers awhile to notice what was happening until her report cards started coming home with incompletes and her grades fell, and they caught her telling them she was at our house when she was really out running around with him. At first they dismissed it as Molly finally stepping into her heritage and sowing some wild oats; they lectured her about her grades and lying to them but didn’t take the thing with him seriously because, hey, the kid was Klaustreich, it’s not like she was going to marry him. If anything she’d learn to appreciate her own kind even more. That was the kind of logic going on, and it might’ve held true if it was one of Molly’s extroverted sisters just trying out a taste of the ‘other’. Which they did, but just fooling around, curious.

“But Molly felt everything deeply, and she believed her feelings. And she wasn’t so good at reading social cues, remember, so she didn’t see the deception, the hypocrisy, and she wouldn’t listen to me or her old friends warning her, believed him when he said we were just envious. He was making fun of her to his group the whole time he was playing her, acting like she was so hot and he was so crazy about her. Then came the day that she gave me the, ‘Can we just be friends?’ speech.”

“Oh, Monroe, I’m so sorry!”

“It was like somebody tore out my heart with a lightning bolt.”

He stopped breathing for a moment, eyes closed, the pain of that long ago day washing over his face as if it were yesterday. Very gently, with his inhuman strength he lifted Rosalee off his lap and sat her back on the couch beside him, still not looking at her. He bent forward, arms crossed over his thighs, unable to continue for a moment.

Rosalee stroked his back in sympathy. “Monroe, you don’t have to tell me everything. This is too painful for you….”

But he shook his head slowly, taking long cleansing breaths to calm himself. “I need to. Confession being good for the soul, and all that. Mom’s letter triggered so many buried memories; kind of like opening Pandora’s box just a crack, and all this old dark stuff came seething out. You saw what I was like when you came home.”

“Not in a good space. At first I thought it was some horrible news, like someone dying.” At his stricken look before he averted his eyes, she slid her arm around his shoulders and hugged him. “Oh, no. This is going to be bad.”

“A total train wreck. No matter how many warnings anyone yells, once the forces are in play there’s no stopping it. The closer we got to the end of the school year and all the fuss about graduation, the more distant and withdrawn she was. She stopped taking care of her appearance, put on some weight – she’d always been a slender little thing, kind of wiry, she was so active. But not any more. She still stuck by this guy; he was real possessive. Once a girl was his, she was his, until he didn’t want her any more, and sometimes he wouldn’t let her go even then. He was a player, big surprise, but that privilege didn’t extend to his female entourage.

“I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the attraction was, and why Molly put up with him cheating on her blatantly all over the place. I wanted to kill him, naturally, for so many reasons. And I _do_ mean I wanted to kill him.” He looked aside at Rosalee, and she saw murder in his eyes. “Not a figure of speech.”

“I can see that.” She swallowed, nodded once.

“It was so bad, I was spending all my free time roaming the forests alone, further and further afield, away from the places we’d been so free and happy when we were younger. I knew it was dangerous for me to see them together, avoided running into either of them at school or worse, anywhere else. There was a very serious risk I’d lose it; I came close a couple times when I couldn’t avoid walking past them to classes, Molly turning away and hiding her face and that vicious bastard smirking at me.

“But the final blow was at Prom. It’s a good thing I wasn’t there or I’d be in prison right now.” He stared hard at the floor, arms resting on his thighs, hands gripping his legs as he fought for control. “She gave birth to his litter right there in the auditorium, in front of the whole school. He just laughed and left her lying there, humiliated and ruined.”

“She was _pregnant_?” Rosalee reeled back on the couch, horrified, her arm still around Monroe’s bent shoulders. “Nobody knew about it? How could that happen?”

“I guess we all just figured she’d let herself go, she was so unhappy, and she’d cut herself off from all her old friends. She hid it from her family, god knows how, sharing a room with her sister; dressed in layers of loose bulky clothes. But after this disaster when she finally told her parents, they called the police to go get the guy. She was still a minor…statutory rape, and all that. And Dad said the Adlers didn’t trust themselves to go after him themselves. It was too public; if the guy got murdered it’d be pretty clear who the prime suspects were. The Klaustreich blew town ahead of the cops, but on his way out he paid Molly a visit – and slashed her face.”

“OH MY GOD!” Rosalee threw both arms around Monroe and rested her head against his back, holding him tight. “Did they catch him?”

“No,” Monroe growled darkly, and told her what he’d told Nick. “But _someone_ did.”

Rosalee went still as she absorbed what he was saying. After a long, tense silence he leaned back on the couch to face her and she moved with him, arm still around him. His eyes were dark and smoldering with that long ago fury.

“It was my first _menschenjagd_. There’s a reason I’m not telling you, or Nick, his name. No statute of limitations.” He watched intently for her reaction, fearful beneath his anger and hatred for Molly’s abuser.

Rosalee looked deeply into his eyes for a long moment, her lovely face set and stern. “I hope it was long, brutal and excruciating. And that you didn’t get hurt.”

Monroe closed his eyes in relief and touched his forehead to hers, taking her hand in both of his. “I confess to a vengeful murder, and you hope I made him suffer. There are so many reasons I love you.”

She took his face in her hands and kissed him tenderly. “Maybe it’s a Wesen thing. I wanted Freddy’s killers dead so badly, and wished I could do it myself. It was all I could do to just knock out that Skalengeck with the brick when I could have bashed his brains out so easily. But, too many witnesses…especially you.” She kissed him again. “Besides, I realized later they’ll suffer a lot more spending the rest of their wretched lives locked up in Kehrseite prison.”

“And if by some mischance they hadn’t been convicted, Nick would have taken care of them,” Monroe said.

“I didn’t know him that well at the time, but figured he’s do what Grimms do if they were released.” Her eyes flashed amber at that dark imagining. “Nick said Forensics had plenty of damning evidence, including that chunk Freddy bit off one of them. And when Nick and Hank testified at the trials, I knew those lizards were going _down_.”

“Yeah, well, that Klaustreich wasn’t facing anything nearly severe enough for what he did to Molly. And no way were the local police going to catch him. They were spread way too thin, rural area like ours, and of course they had no idea what they were dealing with.”

“He must’ve left the area long before you found out what he did to poor Molly. How did you find him?”

“He was in our territory, and he didn’t know crap about the forest. And I already had the hunt planned; I’d gone over and over it in my mind, imagined every detail of how I’d track him down and make him pay if I ever got the chance. That’s how I survived all those months without losing control when I couldn’t do anything to help Molly.” He gave a deep sigh. “It was just vengeful fantasy...until suddenly it wasn’t. I won’t tell you the details; that’s not important. And, that statute of limitations thing. Don’t want to make you an accessory after the fact, or whatever the legal term is.”

She nodded, but he saw the remaining question in her eyes. “No, I didn’t get hurt. No one had a clue I’d gone after him. Well, except for my folks. We didn’t talk about it, but they figured it out.”

“So…what was in that letter that disturbed you so much?”

“It’s hard to explain. It was just a few paragraphs saying she’d talked to Angela…Mrs. Adler…after losing touch with their family when they moved away from Halfmoon Lake. Left New Hampshire entirely, after what happened to Molly. It’s not like they could stay and raise those little monsters in our small town, and act like the whole disaster never happened. Her life was as scarred as her poor ruined face.” He bowed his head and shook it slowly. “No, it’s… I hadn’t thought about Molly and all of this for such a long time; thought I’d buried and made my peace with it.”

“That’s a pretty huge thing to make peace with.” Rosalee shook her head sadly, aching with sympathy.

“You probably know as well as I do from our recovery programs…the whole ‘grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference’ thing.”

“Yeah, rehab was real big on that one,” she sighed. “Acceptance is a lot easier said than done. There are still a lot of things…like being estranged from my dad and finding out he died while I was in jail…I’m not there yet, not sure I ever will be.”

Their eyes met for a long moment of shared pain and understanding, remorse and regret. Finally Monroe sighed deeply and admitted, “I kind of got lost in a lot of might-have-beens. Paths not taken. How different our lives would have turned out if he’d never shown up and seduced Molly away.”

“Wow.” She sat back on the couch, taking that in. “If you’d stayed, and married her…settled down close to your families.”

“Yeah, all that. And everything else that wouldn’t have happened to tear my life apart and piece it back together, making me a very different person than I started out to be. Kind of a multiverse, existential crisis of the soul going on.” He sighed again, head still down. “It’s going to take me some time to process all this. Really yanked a deep chain and brought up a lot of unresolved stuff I didn’t even know I still had. A lot of old pain and regrets.”

Rosalee shivered at the dark tone in his voice. She drew her knees up to her chest and clasped her arms around them, her mind reeling with unwanted fearful thoughts and feelings of guilt and unworthiness rooted in her own troubled past. After a long silence she struggled to find words for what she had to ask. Finally, softly, she murmured, “Are…we okay?”

Lost in his own troubled reveries, it took a moment for his wife’s anxious question to penetrate. “What?” He sat up quickly and met her worried eyes. “No!” At her expression of alarm, he stammered to clarify. “I mean, yes – don’t worry; it doesn’t change anything between us. Things happened the way they happened, and we’re so blessed to have each other in spite of it all. It’s a miracle…a whole series of them...that we survived and made the life we’re sharing now.”

Relief flooded her sad and lovely face. She released her legs, slipping out of her defensive position and turning to wrap her arms around her suffering husband. “No regrets about us…instead of what might have been?”

He folded her into a comforting hug. “I have regrets about a lot of things. But none about you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me and way better than I deserve. I don’t know how you put up with me as messed up as I am.”

“Let’s not get into a match of ‘more damaged than thou’, honey. You’ve had to deal with plenty of my old baggage and a lot of unpleasant surprises.” She stroked the stray lock of hair back from his brow and caressed his face, trailing her fingertips through his beard, looking into his troubled brown eyes. “I think we should go to bed and let you sleep on this. Feels like you’ve got a lot to process.”

He nodded, lips pressed together. “I’m afraid I’m not very good company tonight.”

“I don’t want you staying up alone all night working through this. Come to bed. Lie there awake if you have to, but let me be with you. I’m glad you told me all of this. If there’s more, we can talk about it in the morning. Or in the middle of the night if you need to. But for now, let’s put the wine away, go brush our teeth and put our jammies on, and cuddle up in bed together. Does that work for you?”

He nodded, closing his eyes briefly, his mouth relaxing into a slight smile. “I think I can do that.”

“Good.” She leaned in to kiss him again, then took his hands and drew him up with her as she slid off the couch. “Go take your meds, I’ll clear up down here and be with you in a couple minutes.” Reaching for the bottle and their wine glasses, she hesitated over the troublesome letter lying half-open on the coffee table.

Monroe swept up the loose pages and folded them, tucking them back into their envelope. “This can keep till tomorrow, or whenever. Enough…more than enough for tonight. You’re right. I’m wiped.”

She eyed him assessingly. “Maybe. I hope you can sleep. Either way, I’ll be there with you.”

He nodded gratefully and dropped the letter back on the table, heading for the stairs.

After their goodnight kisses and cuddles, Rosalee drifted to sleep nestled supportively beside Monroe, one arm draped over his chest as he lay on his back staring up into the shadows.

Sleep, as expected, eluded him. Too many vivid memories crowded in, of people and things he’d purposely walled off in his mind years and years ago in self defense, mistakes he’d made and deeply regretted but couldn’t change or undo. Scenes of his home life, growing up alone in that house with Bart and Alice, two very strong and willful personalities with high expectations for their only son; time spent playing with Molly when they were kids, both relishing their freedoms away from home in nature and in the relative sanctuary of Monroe’s quiet house.

_If Molly and I had the future we’d imagined…if the Klaustreich had never come to our school, or if all of us who loved her could have turned her away from him in time, what would our lives be like now? Who and where would we be? If only…so, so many if onlies._

If he hadn’t gone off the deep end after grad school from too many years of academia and repression, if he’d never moved to Portland to make a fresh start away from the provincial life at home and the unresolved loss of Molly, never met Hap Lasser and through him, the volatile and dangerous Angelina, never run wild with her for years culminating in their notorious month outdoors in the Cascades where, toward the end, he could no longer deny the deadly symptoms of the _Umkippen_ manifesting in both of them…if he hadn’t checked into the wieder program and completely changed his life, given up so many things he loved for the sake of sanity and self-control…if he’d never met the Grimm, or Rosalee….

Mind spinning, Monroe shifted restlessly under the covers, trying not to disturb his sleeping wife. He knew from bitter experience these thoughts spiraling out of control led nowhere useful or good. Reluctantly he faced the process he knew he needed to work through, one of the many coping skills they’d learned in therapy and practiced together in their support group out at Helvetia Tavern.

He could still hear the group leader’s voice, guiding them through it over and over again. “First, be in a safe space where nothing can hurt you and you can’t hurt anyone, including yourself. _Remember_. Let the memories come but don’t just be the observer, like watching a video. _Feel_ what you’re feeling; look clearly at what happened and why. Get inside the memories, experience them fully, and live them again and again until you can let them go. Until they lose their power.”

Monroe steeled himself, closed his eyes, and let them come.

 

_Spring 1993, Halfmoon Lake_. Weighed down with a heavy backpack full of textbooks and homework, Monroe trudged across the quad and cut through the trees and grass edging the campus toward the neighborhood where he’d parked his cherished 1974 VW Bug.

He’d worked hard for years under the strict supervision of his horologist aunt and uncle, and even more so, his father, to learn the family business of timepiece maintenance and repairs, finally earning enough the previous summer to buy the sturdy old car. Molly had been as excited as he was at the newfound freedom the car brought them, and he’d never felt as proud of an accomplishment as the day he first drove it to her house and opened the passenger door to usher her in.

Now he only drove alone. His Molly was gone. The bright, funny, enthusiastic friend he’d grown up with, then grown to love had left him months ago, seduced away by that strutting, sneering alley cat Travis Jenkins. He’d jealously cut her off from all her former friends and especially Monroe, dominated all her time and insisted that she only hang out with him and his low-life friends, disdainfully labeling anyone outside his entourage as lame, boring wimps and losers.

Molly had changed. Now when he saw her on campus or in class, she turned away quickly or averted her gaze. But the few times their eyes did meet briefly, hers looked haunted. Her shining auburn hair was now dull and limp, her skin sallow.  
Always a slender, active girl who could eat all the pizzas and fries and ice cream she wanted and never gain a pound, she’d put on weight and taken to wearing layers of loose clothes, her posture now slumped and round-shouldered.

Jenkins blatantly cheated on her with half a dozen girls, making no effort to hide their flirting and fondling in front of her. But she wasn’t allowed any such freedoms. He was humiliating her but wouldn’t dump her, wouldn’t let her go. Monroe _saw red_ every time he caught a glimpse of the Klaustreich and the girl he still loved.

Even thinking about it, he felt his eyes _woge_ as he walked, staring down unseeing at the grass beneath his feet. He closed them and shook it off, cursing under his breath, then made himself look up and focus on his surroundings. What he saw stopped him in his tracks, stopped him even breathing.

Molly sat alone under an old elm tree, slumped on a bench with her textbooks and jacket beside her. She’d taken off her heavy sweater in the warmth of the spring afternoon, her arms bare in a short-sleeved shirt that looked several sizes too big, as if she’d borrowed it from one of her brothers. Horrified, Monroe could see the scratches and deep bruises from where he stood. Touching her left arm carefully, examining a fresh red welt, she hadn’t noticed him coming through the trees; her face crumpled and she softly started to cry.

Jenkins was abusing her physically as well as emotionally. It was more than Monroe could stand, despite Molly telling him to stay away. He covered the distance between them in seconds, hunter silent, and crouched beside her before she realized he was near.

“Molly, no!”

She reeled back and cried out in shock and fear, reaching for the sweater to cover up her injuries and shame, but Monroe was having none of it. He tossed the sweater out of her reach and gently took her by the wrists, exposing the evidence of her abuse. Older scratches were scabbed over, new ones angry red and seeping, on top of multicolored bruises in various stages of healing all up and down her arms, especially where Jenkins had seized her hard below her shoulders and punctured her flesh with his claws.

“Leave me alone,” Molly pleaded, tears splashing down her cheeks. “If he sees me with you….”

“He’s hurting you! You don’t deserve this! Don’t let him treat you like this – you’ve got to get away from him!”

Shaking her head and trying to push him away, she cried, “It’s too late. It’s too late, I’m ruined.”

Monroe wouldn’t let go, certain she’d bolt away. He held onto her wrists firmly but gently. “Molly, don’t say that! You have so many people who love you. You’ve got to _dump_ this guy before he seriously hurts you.”

At that Molly gave a strangled sob and doubled over, giving up her struggle in his grasp. “You don’t understand, I can’t dump him. It’s too late, and anyway he wouldn’t let me….”

“ _Let_ you? He doesn’t own you!” Carefully, he released her wrists and gently, loosely encircled her with his arms. “I know I’ve lost you, it’s too late for you and me, but…talk to your parents, they’ll help you. They can’t possibly know he’s hurting you or they’d tear him up into quivering little bits of catfish bait!”

She moaned, hiding her injured arms under her breasts. “No, no, I can’t. I can’t do that to them. They’re going to hate me….”

“Molly, you’re not making any sense! Your mom and dad could never hate you, what are you talking about? They love you, you’re their shining star….”

She burst into hysterical sobs then and tried to pull away again. This time Monroe let go, afraid of hurting her abused arms and belatedly realizing she didn’t need another guy holding her against her will.

“You’re just making it worse. Monroe, please, please, leave me alone…don’t tell anyone. If he sees me talking to you or someone snitches to him it’ll be so much worse!”

“Are you kidding me? I’ll tear his damned arms off – and you know I could do it!”

“No, no, please…I need him. I’m stuck, I have to make this work somehow….”

“This is crazy talk. You need to get away from this asshole right now. Come on, let me take you home to your parents. They… _we_ can keep you safe until this guy is bad history. Trust me, Molly…you can still do that, can’t you? Please?”

“It’s too late. I’m too afraid. And you’re too good for me, Monroe.” With that she gathered up her sweater and jacket and books and hurried away, begging, “Please don’t follow me. Leave me alone. Forget I ever existed!”

“I can never do that! Never – I still love you!”

“No.” She walked faster, almost running from him. “Not if you knew what I really am….”

Furious and helpless, sick with fear for his dearest friend since childhood, his first love, Monroe watched her disappear through the trees on the path back to her neighborhood. Rage surged in him, angry fire that threatened his control of his beast within; if by any chance that fucking Klaustreich crossed his path, there would be blood and plenty of it. _And not much of it mine_ , he growled in his mind, seething with fury.

She’d forbidden him to follow her and he didn’t see any way that would help her now. But he refused to stay silent. Her safety and maybe her life were at stake, regardless of how upset and angry she would be. If she hated him for the rest of her life for telling her family, so be it – at least she’d be alive and free of her abuser. He had no doubt the Adlers would see to that, legally…or otherwise.

He voted for otherwise, especially if he could help.

He turned and headed back to his car, and home. He was way out of his depth and didn’t want to make things worse; his parents would know what to do.

 

Alice was home from school and comfortable in slacks and a blue floral blouse that matched her eyes. Sleeves rolled up, she was stabbing a roast deeply with a fork and turning it in marinade when Monroe came in the back door, stalked straight through toward his room and dumped his backpack on his bed, not quite slamming the door. She had smelled his upset as he was coming up the driveway and felt the waves of anger pouring off him all the way through the house.

She sensed it wasn’t about her, so continued tenderizing the meat, cutting up potatoes and onions to roast with it. Bart was a classic meat and potatoes guy, emphasis always on the meat, and that suited her just fine.

She heard Monroe slamming and banging around in his room and some muffled cursing off and on, and wondered what it was all about, knowing he would share only if and when he was ready. Maybe it was about Prom, coming up soon now, and of course without Molly he had no one to go with. But that wasn’t the kind of thing her introverted, socially awkward son would normally be upset about.

He’d been way more anxious than eager when he took Molly to the junior-senior dance last year, where they got all dressed up but sat out most of the dances except a few slow ones because both were shy in crowds and had never learned to dance to popular music.

Alice had been a chaperone, of course, and true to her reputation had hunted down and fiercely chastised any couples who tried to sneak away from the auditorium to make out.

No, it had to be something else. She thought hard as she wrapped bacon around bundles of asparagus and set them to fry in her cast iron skillet; the best way to get either of her men to eat vegetables, wrap them in bacon. Her favorite way, too.

The roast was nearly done when Bart came home in great grand spirits. He hung his overcoat in the front closet, dropped his briefcase and clock repair kit on the entry table and strode into the kitchen to give her an enthusiastic kiss on the nape of her neck below her layered blonde hair, followed by a suggestive nip…for later. She beamed, flashing her human canines, without looking up from her work.

“You’re in a good mood,” she observed, then left the bacon and asparagus to sizzle while she turned to face him and meet his bear hug with one of her own, rubbing his back.

“Where’s the kid?” Bart asked, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively, and Alice laughed.

“In his room. Dinner first – we all need our sustenance.”

“I know, I’m starved – what else is new?” He went to fix a drink at the opposite counter. “You ready for one?”

“Not just this minute…Bart, something’s up with Monroe.” She hated to deflate his good spirits; he could be a moody, hot-tempered man. But she was no slouch in that department either.

“What – he off in space again?”

“No. I’m not sure what it is. But he came storming in and went straight to his room, not a word, not a glance, and there’s been a lot of banging around and swearing in there.” She paused and listened. “At least there was awhile ago.”

“Sounds about normal for a seventeen year old Blutbad who’s lost his girlfriend to a freaking Klaustreich juvenile delinquent halfway through senior year.” He poured two fingers of bourbon in his glass, swirled the ice and savored his first sip.

“He’s devastated about Molly, of course. We all are. Angela’s beside herself with worry. Molly’s grades are falling, she’s on an emotional roller coaster all the time; she’s not really talking to them any more and they’ve always been such a close family.” Alice was deeply distressed for her friend, and for the girl who had been such a fixture in her household for so many years.

“That bastard’s no good for her. I never understood why they tolerated her going out with him in the first place!”

“They thought she was just curious and trying to widen her social circle a bit. They didn’t find out what he was until long after she broke up with Monroe and stopped seeing her other friends. Her younger sister snooped around and found out about this guy. Molly was furious when they confronted her about it and stopped speaking to any of them for days.”

“She’s not even talking to her older sister? I thought they were close. God, Monroe’s confusing enough. What kind of mess would we be in if we had a girl?”

_We did_ , Alice thought, then shook the mournful memory away. “Paula is years older, away at college now, and they’re so different.”

“Yeah, Molly was a real surprise for them, kind of like Monroe was for us.” Bart sipped his drink and shook his head. “Well, he’ll tell us or he won’t.”

“Whatever it is, he was radiating waves of rage so strong, I almost _woged_. ”

_"What?"_

“I’m not exaggerating.” She went back to the stove and turned the asparagus bundles, the bacon crisping nicely around them. Sliding the tray of potatoes and onions out of the oven, she flipped them deftly with a spatula and shoved them back in to finish on the rack under the roast.

“Mmm, smells great. I could eat a Bauerschwein – a whole one, by myself!”

“And have, on occasion!” Alice teased him, blue eyes sparkling.

“Ah…youth,” Bart sighed. “Better with barbecue sauce.”

“You are just _awful!”_

“That’s why you married me, isn’t it?”

“It was the only way I could tear your clothes off and have my way with you…legitimately.”

“Yeah, it was time we got around to making it legal. I guess.”

She smacked his shoulder smartly with her spatula as he reached into the skillet to snag some bacon. “Only to appease our families…and because we were starting one.”

“Anticipated the honeymoon, I believe is the operative term.”

“By more than a year, yes!” Her eyes flashed blue fire at him and he grinned hugely before popping his stolen bacon into his mouth. She leaned in and kissed him while he was still chewing.

“Well, I’m glad you guys are having such a good time,” a sardonic voice said from across the room, and they turned to see a morose Monroe leaning in the doorway. His red and black plaid shirt was unbuttoned and hanging loose over the black T-shirt that was coming untucked from his jeans. He looked uncharacteristically slovenly, dark hair mussed, brow lowered over his unsettling brown eyes. Arms folded, he rested heavily against the doorframe, legs crossed at the ankles.

“That’s why you’re here, dear,” Alice retorted, trying to get a read on her complicated son.

Bart waved his glass in Monroe’s direction. “So what’s eating you?”

“It’s more, who I should be eating,” Monroe said darkly, lowering his eyes in stages…always a bad sign.

“Sounds serious. You want a beer or something?”

“Not a good idea the way I’m feeling. I need to talk to you guys. It _is_ serious. Deadly.” He didn’t move or raise his eyes. This was not normal, certainly not for Monroe.

“Then come set the table, and we can talk over dinner,” Alice said. “Bart, do you want to go and get changed?”

“I’m fine,” he said gruffly. Usually he wanted to shed his suit and tie as soon as he got home and get comfortable. This was not shaping up to be a comfortable evening.

Bart could feel what Alice was talking about – simmering, barely controlled anger rolling off Monroe, enough to make Bart feel prickly and ready to _woge_ , too. What the hell was going on with his so-seldom volatile son? This felt like a lot more than teenage hormones and routine high school disappointments.

Monroe unfolded himself from the doorway and went to set the table in silence, his visible effort to suppress his beast filling the air with tension. He set each place with precision, the silverware, napkins and plates aligned perfectly, keeping himself rigidly under control. He hadn’t meant to disrespect his parents; it was just that the sight of their happy enjoyment of each other after all these years and everything they’d been through was like acid on his raw feelings after the encounter with Molly.

Mastering himself, his back still to them as he methodically set the table, he growled, “Sorry. I’m just _very_ …” he took a deep breath, “ _upset_ about something. And it’s not you.”

“Well, then,” Alice said quietly. She pulled the roast beef from the oven and set it on a carving board, where Bart cut it into thick, juicy red slices while she plated the vegetables.

“Ketchup?” he asked.

“If you must,” she sighed, and grabbed the bottle from the fridge.

“Ready for that drink now?”

“Oh, god, yes!” She accepted it gratefully while Bart topped off his own and headed for the table. Monroe came in and pointedly poured himself a tall glass of water, with ice.

The three of them sat down at the heavy old clawfoot table beside the dark carved Black Forest sideboard and china cabinet. A cuckoo clock went off incongruously in the living room and Monroe cringed. Food was passed around without conversation and before starting to eat, as was their long custom, they all held hands and bowed heads for a silent moment of gratitude honoring the sacrifice of the creature that had died to feed them.

Monroe glowered at his plate, his palms resting flat on the table. Bart was already diving in, dipping bites of nearly bloody red meat into either the pool of ketchup or dollop of sour cream horseradish next to it on his plate. Alice cut her roast into precisely same-sized bites before lifting her fork to her mouth, watching Monroe intently.

“Not hungry?” Bart asked finally, and Monroe growled, “I’m ravenous. I just don’t know where to start.”

“Okaaay,” Bart drawled, “Start by sticking a fork in it and putting it in your mouth. Then chew. Swallow. You’ll remember how it works.” He was intentionally baiting his son…not an unknown practice under more normal circumstances…but in this case to provoke him out of whatever was keeping him so rigid and unresponsive.

To Alice’s relief, it worked. Monroe picked up his fork and proceeded to do serious damage to all the food on his plate, though stabbing the meat more forcefully than was necessary. He ate quickly, neatly, without looking up at them until the food was gone.

Alice and Bart made normal conversation about their day at work and news about a German relative planning to visit in summer, while waiting for that other dangling shoe to drop.

“It’s good,” Monroe said finally, looking up at them without lifting his bowed head. “Very. Thanks, Mom. I’m sorry I was so…the way I was when I got home.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it. And you’re still the way you were when you got home.”

Monroe sighed deeply, lowering his eyes and again placing his hands flat on the tablecloth on either side of his plate, as if that helped keep them from morphing into claws. “It’s…about Molly.”

“Thought it must be,” Bart said.

“It’s not that; it’s not about me. That…that Klaustreich is abusing her. I saw the bruises and the claw marks. Today.” He had to clench his teeth and resist with all his might to keep from _woging_.

“What?” Alice cried and Bart snarled, “The hell you say!”

“She’s hiding it from her parents, from everybody.” Now it all came pouring out like lava from a volcano. “She didn’t see me – she was out under a tree by herself and had her sweater off. I could see where he’s been slashing her and grabbing her arms so hard it’s leaving deep bruises. She tried to cover up when she saw me coming but it was too late.”

“But _why?”_ Alice asked, horrified.

“She doesn’t have to put up with that!” Bart raged. “What’s wrong with her? She’s Blutbad, she could take his head off without hardly trying!”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her.” Monroe looked up at them now, his eyes glowing red, too upset and angry to hold back that partial _woge_. “She’s barely the same person…she’s so afraid and says she can’t lose him, she needs him and has to make this – fucked up ‘relationship’ work. Sorry, but….”

“Appropriate,” Bart growled. “Go on.”

“She kept telling me to leave her alone, it’s too late, she can’t dump him – that was _my_ advice, and anyway he wouldn’t let her.”

“ _Let her!”_ Alice snarled, eyes flashing red with outrage. “Since when does he have the right, or the power, to ‘let’ her do anything!”

“I know, but she’s so…beaten down, so afraid of something. She begged me to stop talking to her and go away in case anyone saw her with me, he’d be jealous and it’d be so much worse…” Monroe’s eyes widened and his face rippled as he stared at his parents; his hands morphed into claws, denting the tablecloth before he could force back the _woge_. Voice shaking with rage, he told them, “And I know for a dead fact that he’s catting around with some of the sluttiest girls in school and not even bothering to do it behind her back. But she can’t even _talk_ to me?”

“This is very, very bad,” Alice said, her voice low and nearly guttural. “We have to tell her parents. They can’t know this is going on or they’d never stand for it!”

“I tried to get her to let me take her home to them, told her that they, we would protect her but she got hysterical and told me to leave her alone, don’t follow her and forget she existed – like I ever could! Then she took her stuff and ran away crying. I didn’t know what to do; that’s when I came home. I needed to talk to you, both of you.”

Growing increasingly agitated, gripping the edge of the table for control, he admitted, “I didn’t trust myself to go anywhere else, not after Molly and not after that goddamned tomcat! Otherwise you’d probably be visiting me in jail right now, for mutilation and murder…at least!”

Bart released a heavy breath and looked steadily at his son. Monroe believed, and he believed, that was no exaggeration, and he couldn’t blame the boy… _young man,_ at all. Monroe had done the responsible thing, almost impossible as it was. He was Blutbad, through and through, something Bart had doubted at times with all of Monroe’s nerdy, intellectual ways and his trouble sorting out how to navigate dealing with other people. But this, Bart understood. Completely.

As did his wife.

“I believe,” she said, keeping her voice level and calm with some difficulty, “we need – your father and I, to talk to Molly’s parents, and keep you out of it except to explain what you saw and what she said. She specifically told you to stay away from her?”

Monroe bowed his head, shoulders rigid. “She did.”

Bart blew out a harsh breath, shaking his head. “Damn!”

“Yeah.”

“We need to think about this, and calm down. Angela’s already worried sick about Molly, says she’s not herself, her grades are dropping, she was even sneaking out on school nights to see this…creature.”

“But _why?”_ Monroe roared, slamming his fist on the table, making all the dishes and glassware rattle. “What’s this creepy, nasty power he has over her? He’s slime – he gives slime a bad name! He’s stepping out on her, treating her like crap, and now he’s even hurting her physically! Why does she put up with him, why doesn’t she just _leave_ him?” His voice broke. “I’d take her back in New York minute like none of this ever happened….”

“It’s not like he’s a Ziegevolk,” Bart said. “And even they’re not usually abusive, just players, but everybody knows that…what d’you expect?”

“Klaustreiche aren’t exactly known for their family values, especially the males,” Alice observed dryly. “Look at this…individual. What kind of family, or lack thereof, did he come from? After I threw him out of my algebra class,” and her menfolk knew she meant literally, “I heard from Claire in the counselors’ office that he already has a rap sheet as long as your arm, keeps getting booted out of foster homes, in and out of juvenile detention, for all the good that did.”

“Kept him off the streets for awhile, that’s all,” Bart said. “Not long enough. Molly’s a sweet kid, what did she ever see in this creep? I mean, a Klaustreich, what the hell?”

“Apparently, I was too familiar, not exciting enough. That’s what one of her girlfriends told me.” Monroe’s voice was strained. “He was adventure, walk on the wild side, the forbidden, something like that. Like some dumb romance novel, I don’t know, but Molly was never into that. She made fun of the ones her friends passed around.”

He closed his eyes briefly, swallowed hard, and confessed, “I do know I miss her…it’s like a huge essential part of me is gone. And more than that, now I’m afraid for her, afraid she’s getting seriously hurt, and she’s telling me to shut up about it and leave her the hell alone! Well, she didn’t say hell but it was there in her tone. But I had to do something. We, you, have to do something. Please. I’m no good at this, I don’t know what else to do. I just want to kill this guy – _so bad!”_

“There may come a time for that,” Bart said grimly, “but we’re not there yet. We’ll talk to the Adlers. But you _stay away_ from him. And her, so he doesn’t have that excuse to hurt her. But you tell us anything else you find out or hear from her friends….”

“She doesn’t really have friends anymore. She dropped them, too.”

“No,” Alice breathed. “That is so very not good.”

“Tonight,” Bart said. “Can’t wait. Too dangerous.” And the look he exchanged with Alice meant not just for Molly, but for Monroe. Their son was way too close to going off like a lycanthrope, only he’d know exactly who his victim was, damn the consequences.

“I’ll call Angela and tell her we need to come over.” Alice rose from her chair and for once in her life didn’t stop to clear the table and put leftovers away – what there were; angry, upset Blutbaden tended to have ferocious appetites. She strode off toward the phone in the den.

Monroe called after her, “I’ll clean up, Mom,” wanting to make amends for lashing out at his parents earlier, and methodically began to do so.

“You have homework?” Bart asked automatically, and instantly regretted it when his son turned stricken eyes on him.

“Maybe later. I…I can’t right now. There’s not that much. I did most of it at school before….”

“Right. Of course.” From his brusque father, Monroe recognized that as an apology. “Let’s hear what your mother finds out.”

Her low voice drifted out from the den but neither of them could make out how the conversation was going from her side of the phone call. Then she emerged from the shadowy den, marching to the entry hall to collect her coat and purse. Passing Bart, she said, “We’re going. _Now.”_

Bart put a firm hand on his tall, lanky son’s shoulder. “ _Stay here_. I mean it.”

Monroe nodded with difficulty. “I know.”

The weight of dread they all felt made him think about the whole Wesen community’s reaction when that Siegbarste beat his friend Freddy’s dad to death in his own garage just two doors down from their house, then mutilated the body with the victim’s own power tools. But nobody saw that coming.

This was very much a different story.

After cleaning the kitchen to near surgical standards, Monroe paced the living room for what seemed an endless time, fingers laced behind his back, grateful that at least it wasn’t a full moon. That would have been no help at all.

 

Two hours later his parents returned, grim and solemn. Monroe gave up any pretense of trying to do homework and came out of his room to meet them. Their expressions told him it hadn’t gone well.

“She’ll be protected now,” Bart said gruffly, then squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Hard to believe she’s the same girl who practically grew up here. She was like a daughter to us.”

Alice’s voice trembled with emotion. “I barely recognized her. She’s changed so much, more than I realized seeing her around school. I knew she was avoiding me but I thought it was because she broke up with you, honey.”

“What? What happened?” Monroe was desperate to know, and afraid to hear.

“She ran upstairs to her room when we showed up. Angela and Karl went upstairs and confronted her,” Alice said. “They sent Liesl downstairs to stay with us, poor child; she feels horribly guilty she didn’t know how bad it was, Molly’d hidden it from her even sharing a room. There was a furious row; they had to physically pull off the bulky sweater she was hiding in and saw the marks you were talking about. She was crying and screaming, defending this Travis, insisting he didn’t do this to her, he _loved_ her. But she couldn’t come up with a name for anyone else who’d hurt her. They told her she was never to see him again, and they’d have her sister and brothers guard her at school for the rest of the term.”

Monroe nodded, teeth clamped. The Adler sons were a force to be reckoned with, even the youngest, Bruno, a skinny freshman. He knew the brothers had chafed at Molly’s dating the Klaustreich but knew better than to try controlling any of their sisters; the more assertive Paula and Liesl had both set them straight on that count early in their dating years. But now, with parental backing, they would give no quarter when it came to protecting their abused sister.

“I’ll protect her, too,” he growled, but Bart said firmly, “No, you won’t. Stay away from her. She’s blaming you for telling on her, no surprise. When she was really hysterical she even tried to blame you for some of the bruises, said you were jealous, grabbed her arms and wouldn’t let her go this afternoon.”

“No!” Monroe felt the earth fall out from under him. “No, no way! I held onto her a little at first, trying to keep her there and talking to me, but not hard enough to…oh, god, no. I let her go as soon as I realized,” his voice broke with anguish, “I was holding her against her will and she’d already had way too much of that….”

“She’s a broken child right now, Monroe,” Alice said gently. “It’s hard to even recognize her as our Molly. She needs a lot of support and reassurance and protection from her family right now. We know it’s unfair, you’ve been hurt, too, but she wants nothing to do with you. I know deep down she must feel awful about treating you that way but she has much bigger problems to get through right now.”

“And don’t go picking a fight with this worthless piece of crap Travis, either. It’s not worth your future. You did the best you could for her, you did the right thing.” Bart paused and looked directly into Monroe’s eyes, letting his own flare red. “And I know it doesn’t feel that way right now. You want blood and I don’t blame you.” He watched Monroe look away, staring angrily toward the ceiling as he wrestled with his emotions. “So do they. But we live in a more civilized society than that now, mostly. Let the Adlers take care of their own. They know we’re with them, we’ll do anything we can to help Molly. But for now you can help her most by staying out of her sight. I’m truly sorry, son.”

His large, strong hand felt heavy on Monroe’s shoulder, as if it were holding him down as much as comforting. Monroe stiffened, struggling not to _woge_. “So what am I supposed to do now? Shrug and say okay, they got this, and just go off to bed? I can’t.” He turned desperate eyes to his father. “I really _can’t_ ….”

Bart nodded curtly and turned to Alice. As expected, she nodded, too.

“We all need this,” she said, and to Monroe, “Even on a school night. You can wear those; we need to get changed.”

Within minutes they were out the back door of the bonus room and into the night forest, _woged_ and silent, seeking release in the hunt and the blood of substitute prey.

 

_September 2014. Lying in bed with Rosalee sleeping beside him, Monroe stared into the darkness. Deep in his painful reverie, he vividly relived the cruel satisfaction of that long ago hunt with his parents, the blazing fury he’d felt in the pursuit and the displaced vengeance he’d exacted on the hapless feral boar he brought down, his parents holding back so he could make the kill alone._

They fell on the boar like the wolf kin they were, ripping and tearing its flesh, swallowing bloody gobbets of muscle, heart and liver as if they hadn’t dined at table earlier on civilized food.

Only when he could devour no more did the blood lust fade enough for Monroe to revert to human form, crouched over the shredded carcass with his equally blood- and gore-spattered parents. Chest heaving from exertion and adrenaline, he pushed back from the kill and shook his head to clear his mind. This changed nothing about the situation with Molly, but at least he’d vented his rage enough to regain his control.

“Better?” his mother growled, claws still deep in the chest cavity of the dismembered boar. Monroe nodded, catching his breath, bloody hands resting on the knees of his jeans.

“At least I can think in words now.” He focused on the nocturnal sounds of the midnight forest surrounding them, the buzz and chirp of insects, rustling of small rodents in the fallen leaves, trickling water in a nearby creek. Above in a towering oak, an owl voiced its eternal question. _A very good question for me at the moment_ , Monroe thought. _Who, indeed, or what, am I?_

“That’s progress.” Bart’s voice was rough and deep, coming from his _woged_ form. He tossed aside the gnawed thigh of the boar, saving it for later. “Don’t know how the urban Blutbaden manage. Sometimes you just need to get out right now and hunt. And not in the concrete jungle.” With a satisfied sigh, he tossed his head and un- _woged_ , face and forearms smeared with blood.

Alice finished field dressing the boar with her claws before rejoining her family in human form. They would not dishonor their kill by leaving its good meat behind, wasted. “I think I can face my morning classes now without eviscerating anyone who didn’t do their homework – verbally or otherwise.”

Monroe regarded his parents with renewed love and respect. They all had their issues and he knew at times they struggled to understand him, but he never doubted their love and devotion for him and each other. Wiping blood off his face on a clean patch of sleeve, he said simply and meaningfully, “Thanks.”

They both nodded and Bart said, “We’ll all sleep better for it. Be able to face the day….” He looked at Monroe for confirmation and his now-composed son nodded. “Don’t let it build up, son. Come out here and let it rip. We are what we are, and it’s no good to deny the beast when we’re this angry about something we can’t control. I know you’ve heard all this a hundred times growing up, but it’s different when you’re in the middle of it in real life.”

“No shit,” Monroe swore, then closed his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Alice said. “It’s how you feel. How we all feel. Imagine how it is for Molly’s parents and brothers and Liesl, finding out from us what’s been going on in their own family, their own house. I half expected to run into some of them hunting out here tonight, whoever wasn’t staying home with Molly. As much as any of us want to hunt down that Klaustreich and gut him like this boar, we can’t let our natures overrule our reason.”

“I know.” Monroe hung his head. “I hate him and want him dead for hurting Molly. And…I’m mad at her for hurting me.” _There, he’d said it, even though it felt incredibly selfish admitting it aloud_. “I would never hurt her, how could she say that? I know she’s all messed up with this, it’s not our Molly talking, but still….” His throat swelled shut against the welling emotions and he fiercely blinked back tears.

“No, it’s not our Molly talking. She’s a very troubled girl, very confused and frightened,” Alice said gently, her soft voice incongruous with her blood-smeared face. “She’s going to need a lot of help to find her way back to herself. But that help can’t come from you, or us. Not now, maybe never. You need to accept that, Monroe. You’ve done all you can for her; you need to let her healing take its course. She may very well need to look forward, and not back. And I know how unfair and hard that is.”

“I love her.” The words were hushed, strained.

“We know,” Alice said. “We do, too.”

“Not the same.”

“Course not.” Bart reached over to clasp his son’s shoulder. After a moment, understanding, Monroe reached up and covered his dad’s hand with his own.

“Thanks,” he managed. “It’s not…it wasn’t puppy love.”

Alice winced, remembering. “Not for a long time now. We were expecting someday she’d truly be our Molly, too, until…all this happened. There’s heartbreak all around, Monroe. Especially yours.”

“It’s going to be hard. Going back to school, doing normal things I don’t even care about any more. And seeing Molly…I can’t help it, you know, Mom; it’s a small school, you see everybody changing classes.”

“Think how hard it’s going to be for Molly.”

His heart ached with sympathy for his lost love, more lost than he’d ever imagined. “Right. You’re right. I…hope she’ll be okay.”

“Her family will see to that, and her parents will make sure the school staff knows to keep that Klaustreich away from her,” Bart said.

“I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t just drop out and disappear the moment he turns eighteen,” Alice said. “After that the foster system can’t keep him.”

“And live on what money? I mean, good riddance, but with a record and attitude like his, where’s he going to get a job he can live on?” Bart snarled.

“Somehow he always seems to have some money,” Monroe said. “Rumor was he was dealing, or stealing. I don’t know for sure.”

“Probably both. I’ve no doubt he’ll graduate soon enough,” Alice said with a resigned sigh, “to the Graybar motel.”

“Not soon enough for Molly,” Monroe said sadly.

“True.” Bart gave his son’s shoulder a squeeze. “Enough for one night. Let’s pack this up and head for home. A few hours sleep will do us good.”

Monroe was silent as they bagged the remaining meat, leaving the head and gut pile for scavengers, washed in the creek and made their way home through the cool spring night.

 

He didn’t see Molly again for almost two months except briefly as she made her way between classes, closely escorted by Liesl, Bruno or sometimes one of her older brothers. She kept her head down, her posture hunched, huddled in loose layers of clothing even as the spring warmed and her fellow students shed their jackets and sweaters on any day without rain.

Travis Jenkins, as Alice had predicted, was truant much of the time, some days showing up just long enough for home room attendance and disappearing from the quad at lunch. His foster parents, Kehrseiten who had no clue what he was, had all but given up on him, no doubt marking their own calendar until he turned eighteen and was off their hands. He made it clear he didn’t give a damn about graduating, and seemed not to give a damn about Molly being sequestered from him either.

Eventually the night of Senior Prom arrived with all of its attendant expectations, fears and fantasies juicing the teens already riding their hormone-fueled emotional rollercoasters. It didn’t help certain members of the student body that it fell on the first night of the full moon.

Monroe stalwartly stayed in his room, blinds and curtains drawn, lying on his bed with headphones on and his CD player beside him. Bart stayed home with him, doing maintenance on several of the household clocks at the kitchen table while Alice went off to her chaperone duty at the crowning event of the school year.

The silent hours dragged on. Monroe looked around the refuge of his room filled with his projects and passions, current and past…so many that he’d shared with Molly. Souvenirs from the family’s trips to Germany, the first simple wooden toy clock his aunt and uncle had made for him to take apart and reassemble when he was little, model locomotives and train cars he’d collected of different eras and track gages. His beloved cello, standing in its corner, music stand folded up beside it.

Sturdy bookshelves in dark-stained wood overflowed with books ranging from recent paperbacks to leather bound Wesen tomes two centuries old, handed down through generations of his father’s family and the Dietrich’s. The well-worn German-English dictionary stood next to the French dictionary he’d used at school, as German wasn’t one of the languages his rural schools offered. Next to his corner desk stacked with textbooks and binders, his clock repair tool kits in their wooden cases stood on the workbench with its industrial work light, clamps and magnifiers, metal cabinet drawers filled with tiny parts, and current repair project disassembled, awaiting his attention.

And everywhere, reminders of growing up with Molly. Practice photos he’d taken of her with his uncle’s antique camera – Molly at ten, high up a tree, collecting an abandoned nest; preteen Molly swimming in Halfmoon Lake close to a gliding family of its famous loons; Molly seated in her long black dress at a concert, holding her oboe. Molly and Monroe posing together at last year’s junior-senior dance in their formal clothes, her auburn hair done up in an elegant French braid and midnight blue dress complementing her lively blue eyes. And so many more, some in drugstore frames, others pinned to the corkboard by the door or stuck in the frame of the mirror over his dresser.

His refuge now felt like a prison where he was in protective custody…to protect him from inflicting grievous bodily harm on a particular Klaustreich and ruining his own and his family’s lives in the process.

It was nearly eleven when Alice burst through the front door, the noise of her entrance penetrating through his headphones and music. Her agitation radiated through the house even before he could make out what she was saying. Monroe pulled off the headphones and launched out of his room to find out what had happened.

Bart was holding his distraught wife by her shoulders, her hands pressed to his chest for support. Alice was looking up at him, tears streaming down her face. “I still can’t believe it…can’t block the image from my mind. That poor, poor girl, lying there on the dance floor in such pain and humiliation…and he just laughs at her and walks away. The utter scorn, the cruelty – I wanted to kill him myself, right there!”

Bart stared at her speechless with shock, barely aware that Monroe had emerged from his room and stood watching them from the hall doorway. With growing horror, Monroe knew in his gut who the poor girl had to be. What had Jenkins done to her? Why was she even at Prom? What the hell…!

“What the hell happened?” he yelled from the hallway. “It’s Molly, isn’t it? What did he do to her?”

Alice turned her stricken, tear-stained face to him, anguish in her eyes. “Oh, Monroe…!” She turned and opened her arms to him as he strode across the room to join his parents, dread clenching his heart. Alice wrapped her arms around him, reaching up, and Bart enclosed them both in his strong embrace.

_“Tell me,”_ Monroe said, voice breaking. “Tell me _now_.”

“Molly came looking for him, for Travis. She told her parents and Liesl she was going stag, with friends, she was ready to be social again and didn’t want to miss out on her senior Prom. No one expected him to be there; he’s been truant for a couple of weeks. But he was there all right, one last time to show off in front of everybody, prancing around with his slutty date and cutting in on other couples on the dance floor, causing trouble. Somehow Molly knew he’d be there and she went straight for him soon as her girlfriends were dancing with their dates.”

Alice had to stop and collect herself, gratefully taking Bart’s proffered handkerchief to swab her eyes and nose. She shook her head and looked down, drawing strength to tell the rest. “This Travis just laughed at her and shoved her away, calling her a fat cow, saying no one would want her like this. The rest of his group laughed at her, too and called her some awful names. She almost fell, stumbled on the hem of that frumpy dress…she _has_ put on a lot of weight through all this, but…then she cried out and doubled over.

“I was on my way over to break this up and throw him and his groupies out, and the other chaperones were moving toward them, too. At first I thought she’d dropped a soda when he pushed her, the floor was wet around her. But no.” Her voice caught and tears of shock and anger flowed again. “She was pregnant. Her water broke. She crumpled to the floor crying out in pain and ended up giving birth right there on the dance floor in front of everyone.”

Monroe stood frozen in horror and rage. His mind refused to accept what he was hearing, but his beast rose within, demanding to come out. His parents _woged_ with him, holding him back; young and strong as he was, he was no match for both of them, though he struggled fiercely in their grip. “I’m going to _kill_ him! I’m going to kill him _tonight_ , I swear! I’m going to tear out his guts and eat them while he’s still living, make him watch!”

“No, you’re not,” Bart growled between clenched fangs by Monroe’s pointed ear.  “Granted, that’d be a good start. But it’s the Adlers’ call. And don’t be an idiot, you’d be a prime suspect!”

“The police are searching for him,” Alice said, her red eyes close to Monroe’s as she gripped his shoulders and held him tight. “She finally confessed to her parents that he’s the father…no surprise, but they didn’t know she was pregnant. She’d been hiding under all those bulky clothes. I was there when Angela pried it out of her while they waited for the ambulance, before they took Molly and the babies to the hospital.”

_“Babies?”_ Monroe’s voice was strangled.

“Four. Poor wretched scrawny little things,” Alice moaned. “Molly’s still a minor. Angela called the police and demanded that they arrest Travis for statutory rape, assault and battery. He took off in all the confusion, of course. No one seems to know or won’t tell where he’s gone.”

“Where the hell are his fosters in all this mess?” Bart snarled.

“Claire told me he turned eighteen last week, packed up his stuff and left. They don’t know where he’s been staying; they were just glad to see him go.”

_“Mein Gott!”_ Bart swore, “Monroe, I’ve half a mind to go with you! I can’t let myself think how Karl and Angela feel right now!”

“They’re all at the hospital with Molly, the whole family; Paula’s on her way from college in New York. It’s up to the police now. They’re all locals, they’re nearly as mad as we are, and remember some of them are Hundjägers. They’ve had run-ins with Travis before. We need to _stay out_ of it!” Alice spoke the words of reason over the roiling cauldron of rage in her heart.

Still rigid, struggling for control, Monroe managed to shake off his _woge_ , angrily accepting that he couldn’t go off in a mad rage in search of Molly’s defiler. Alice and Bart stayed ready in Blutbad form just in case.

“How is she? Will she be okay? Does anyone know?” he asked, voice a strained whisper.

“Angela called from the hospital. Molly’s doing well, under the circumstances. The babies are underweight, not unusual for multiple births. They’ll be in the preemie nursery for a while. She said…” Alice’s voice broke again as tears came, streaming down the wolfish contours of her _woged_ face. “…Molly told her she was afraid that they’d disown her and throw her out when they found out she was pregnant by that creature. That’s why she hid it all this time. She went to Prom to find him and get him to marry her, for his babies’ sake. Like that was ever going to happen!”

“ _That’s_ what she meant…” Monroe struggled to say it. “That’s why she said she was ruined and had to make it work with Travis. She really thought her family would throw her out…that’s…that’s just crazy.”

“Poor deluded kid’s not been in her right mind for awhile,” Bart said, shaking his bearded head, fangs flashing as he spoke. “Where she got that crazy idea….”

“From him, no doubt!” Alice snapped. “Typical abuser! He must’ve been telling her all along that no one would want her, her family would disown her, he was all she had to depend on, the whole time he was mocking and hurting her. She was…so naïve and immature, she believed him, instead of going to her own mother for help.”

“She always felt like the odd kid in her family,” Monroe said softly. “But how could she believe they’d abandon her? They love her, they all love each other, even I could see that. It gets a little loud and tense sometimes, yeah, but that’s just… _normal_. Right?”

“Right. Especially with Blutbaden.” Bart un- _woged_ , certain now his distraught son wasn’t going to bolt, and Alice changed with him. “Best thing now, after the worst has happened, they’re all gathered around her, she knows she’s safe and loved. Next best thing is if the cops get that Klaustreich before any of the Adlers do. The only one who needs to be in prison is this Jenkins kid.”

“Prison’s too good for him,” Monroe growled.

“Agreed, but that’s not our call. You know that!”

Grudgingly Monroe nodded, staring toward the floor.

“There’s nothing more we can do tonight,” Alice said. She looked drained, spent. “I need to get changed, have a cup of herb tea and go to bed. I don’t ever want to have a night like this again.”

“I’ll put the kettle on and have some with you,” Monroe said. “I need something, I was already edgy before you got home.”

“Moontime,” Bart said. “Sure doesn’t help, maybe triggered some of this, made it worse.”

“It’s possible. But this tragedy was already unfolding for months. Poor Molly…and now all these babies,” Alice sighed sadly.

“She was right in some ways,” Monroe said, grieving helplessly for Molly. “Her life _is_ ruined. She had so many big dreams. We were so excited about picking colleges and maybe going there together. She could hardly wait to leave here and live in some big city or great college town, something totally different from Halfmoon Lake. And now she’s stuck here, not even graduating high school, with four babies.”

“And _vorherrscher_ at that.” Bart shook his head. “That’s a long hard row to hoe for anyone.”

“Maybe they’ll take after their mother,” Alice said, with a forlorn note of hope in her voice.

Bart turned glowering eyes to her. “You taking bets?”

 

_September 2014. Monroe lay still in the quiet bedroom, returning to the present to feel tears trickling from the corners of his closed eyes. Rosalee held him gently and kissed the tears away from his left temple._

_“You okay?” she murmured._

_He tried to nod on his pillows but then shook his head side to side. He took her hand where it lay on his chest and kissed it, entwining his fingers with hers._

_Understanding, she settled close beside him, lending him her silent support as he struggled through his long dark night of the soul. Only when he heard her soft sleep breathing did he plunge back into the darkest nightmare of his young life, seeking to exorcise its power._

“She’s home.” Alice reported, hanging up the phone in the den where Monroe and Bart were watching a soccer match. “Home and resting. The babies, too. She doesn’t want to see anyone. Understandable, it’s too soon.”

“They’ll all have their hands full with that litter to take care of. It’s not like Karl or Angela can quit working; the other kids all have school for a few more weeks. They’re going to need help.” Bart hit the mute on the TV remote.

“Karl and Angela are alternating taking time off work, and Liesl and Bruno’s teachers are giving them work to do at home part time so they can keep up and still be with their sister,” she told her husband. “Still, taking care of four demanding babies is too much for even two people, and Molly’s still recovering. She’s trying to nurse but she can’t feed so many.”

Hearing that Monroe groaned and turned away, revolted at the thought of his lost love struggling to feed the Klaustreich’s litter from her abused body.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Alice apologized. “You didn’t need to hear that.”

“No, I didn’t.” Sickened and angry, he got up from the couch, no longer caring about the game or snacks laid out on the coffee table. “I’ll be in my room.”

As he retreated down the hall, Bart growled, “Cops haven’t caught that fucker yet?”

“No. He’s probably miles from here by now. Must’ve have hitchhiked; he didn’t have a car. No one’s seen him since Prom night.”

_I should have hunted him down on Prom night_ , Monroe thought, seeing red. _Someone should_. Door closed, he sat on the edge of his bed, arms braced on his lap, head down. Helpless to do anything else, he went over and over in his mind exactly how he would track and fight and murder Travis Jenkins, given the slightest chance. The best hunts are well planned. In his enraged fantasies, he executed those plans…and Travis.

An hour later he snapped to attention hearing the phone ring, then his mother’s alarmed voice. “Liesl – stop! I can’t understand you…what? What! Oh, honey, we’ll be right there! Stay close to her; keep trying to reach your parents. And call the police!” She slammed down the phone and called out, “Bart! I need you!”

“What the hell?”

“Liesl…she came back from buying formula for the babies…while she was gone, Travis showed up. He must’ve been watching the house, I don’t know. But Molly was alone. He broke in, told her she was a stupid girl for getting pregnant and not ‘taking care of it’, it was all her fault the cops were after him…and slashed her face!”

Bart’s roar rattled doors throughout the house.

“She can’t reach her parents at work; they’re both going in on weekends to catch up,” Alice told him. “We need to get over there right now!”

Swearing fiercely in German, Bart stomped to the door, Alice in his wake. Monroe heard the front door slam and Bart’s truck engine roar to life, and they were gone.

In the shadows of his room, Monroe’s anger went deadly cold.

His distinctive VW was parked in front of the house for all to see. It would stay there. He grabbed his camo hunting jacket, shouldered his hiking backpack and took Alice’s keys from the tray by the door; her car was a non-descript sedan that looked like everything else on the road. He backed it out of their long driveway and made his way across their small town to the Adler’s neighborhood in the afternoon’s lengthening shadows.

Leaving the car parked two blocks away, he made his silent way between neighbors’ deep, sloping backyards along the wooded creek that wound its way behind the houses, a creek where he and Molly had collected tadpoles on many a spring day when they were kids. He knew better than to approach the Adlers’ house too closely; by now it would be swarming with family, neighbors and cops responding to Liesl’s calls for help. He only needed to find the scent trail where the vicious and cowardly Jenkins had fled their property after slashing Molly. Unless he had a car, he’d have run off through the woods to make his escape.

And unless he had an accomplice, he didn’t have a car. Jenkins had been watching from somewhere to make sure he caught Molly alone. Monroe didn’t care where that was; he wanted to know where his prey had gone. He knew the hated Klaustreich’s scent only too well.

_Woging_ in the cover of the dense young alders and willows along this stretch of the creek, he moved slowly along the edge of the shallow water, sniffing for a hint of the acrid feline odor, scanning the deep leaf litter that covered the rising ground toward the houses for any disturbance. Travis was a city kid and proud of it, quick to disparage the inhabitants of Halfmoon Lake as backward country hicks. But this was Monroe’s turf, not his.

Two houses down from the Adlers’ he could hear the commotion, many raised voices, but so far all up at the house. By now the local police, the few likely to be on duty from the small town force, were probably questioning Liesl and poor Molly and starting to search surrounding streets. But Monroe’s instinct told him Travis took the back way out, away from the sight of any neighbors responding to Molly’s screams.

There was no scent to the east or directly below the Adlers’ house, no disturbance of the leaves or damp ground along the creek. Monroe cursed silently, concerned the Klaustreich had escaped another way. But two houses to the west, he found it; Jenkins had cut through two back yards at a diagonal before plunging down the slope into the creek, leaving gouges in the leaf litter on his way down and boot prints in the silty soil of the embankment. His scent lingered where he’d grabbed onto tree trunks to swing down into the creek bed and made his way westward sloshing through the water, carelessly overturning mossy rocks and bending slender stems and branches bordering the creek.

Swiftly Monroe followed, the scent blazing a trail through the neighborhood and beyond where the creek joined a larger stream flowing through undeveloped woodlands, a buffer between the residential area and Suncook Road, State Highway 28, the main road from Halfmoon Lake to anywhere. Grimly he followed it up and, un- _woged_ now, over a culvert and down a private road out toward the highway. If Travis thumbed a ride from there…but there was little traffic on a Saturday afternoon this time of year.

Coming out near the roadside, Monroe stopped and inhaled deeply again, eyes closed, concentrating on his highly developed Blutbad olfactory senses. The cat scent and Jenkins’ human unwashed body odor still hung in the air, wafting southwest toward Barnstead, on the way to Concord and the junction with Interstate 93. From there he could go south to Manchester and down to Boston or just about anywhere in New England.

He had to catch up with Jenkins before there were too many options for his escape.

There’d be no reason for him to linger in the area patrolled by the local police, based in Barnstead, or in the opposite direction in neighboring Alton where no doubt their small police force would also be alerted. And with no wilderness experience, it wasn’t bloody likely Travis would go north and strike out into the forest or up into the local mountains.

But if he stayed on the main roads trying to hitch a ride, there was a strong chance some searchers – police or Wesen – would find him.

Monroe estimated his prey had maybe an hour’s start on him, by the time Liesl came home to find Molly slashed and bleeding, couldn’t reach her parents or brothers and called his house for help. He followed the scent about a half-mile down the highway before it halted, abruptly crossed the road and all but vanished, a faint hint of it lingering in the opposite direction toward Alton. Jenkins had hitched a ride.

Furious but with cold clarity of mind, Monroe ran back to his mother’s car and took off toward Alton, leaning out the window to catch the few molecules of scent in the air streaming by at 45 miles an hour. Whoever had picked up Travis was keeping the windows rolled down; it was a pleasant late afternoon, and possibly his stale sweat offended even human noses.

He nearly lost the trail in Alton, where the driver apparently stopped to pick up some supplies, and possibly dropped off Jenkins. Afraid he’d pick the wrong way at the junction of Highways 28 and 11, he lingered in a parking lot close by until a cool breeze sent a waft of the telltale odor to him from the northwest. They were heading up 28, toward the sprawling tourist mecca of Lake Winnipesaukee or – he hoped – the more rural, mountainous region to its east. Either way, this ride was taking the city boy further and further from so-called civilization.

Twilight softly blanketed the rolling, forested lake country as Monroe drove on, following his nose. At another junction north of Alton, the scent veered right, staying on Highway 28, heading for the aptly named area known as Wolfeboro. With a feral smile, Monroe turned toward the hunting grounds his family knew so well in those local hills and woodlands. He had cousins scattered throughout Wolfeboro, all the way out to Moody Mountain.

Traffic fell away to nothing as they headed further north. The scent grew sharply stronger as he caught up with an older Ford 250 with a tarp strapped over its bed protecting a lumpy load of some kind. He eased back on the gas pedal; he’d found Travis’s ride.

Following at a distance so as not to attract attention, he tracked them through the small towns and hamlets of Wolfeboro and Wolfeboro Falls, heading northeast skirting lakeshores, passing scattered homes and small businesses tucked amid the trees. At last the truck pulled over in the little burg of Wolfeboro Center at a two-pump gas station outside a 7-Eleven. Monroe slowed and watched; the driver, a portly fellow in jeans, plaid shirt and ball cap got out and started gassing up.

And his quarry stepped out of the passenger side, waved to the man and sauntered into the convenience store.

Monroe drove past and parked across the side street in the secluded lot of Calico Graphics, closed for the weekend according to its sign. He made his way through the stand of slender trees shielding the business from the road and watched as the driver finished filling up, paid by credit card, got back in his truck, turned left and rumbled off down North Line Road, heading deeper into the woodlands.

The Klaustreich was at the end of his ride, in more ways than one.

Darkness fell while Monroe waited, moving closer to be ready and have a clearer view. Customers left in the few cars in the parking lot, which faced the side street on the dumpster side of the store. No one else pulled up to the gas pumps. Finally there was one car left in the lot, probably belonging to whoever was working inside. And then Travis strode out, holding a large soda cup and chewing on a Slim Jim.

Figuring his prey would head back toward the main part of the town, Monroe was waiting in the shadows just south of the 7-Eleven, invisible to the store clerk within or anyone driving past on 28. The Klaustreich walked right past him, oblivious, on his way back down the highway toward the cluster of businesses there. Monroe followed him, gradually gaining on him, intentionally pressuring his prey until at last Jenkins’ instincts kicked in and he turned to look behind him.

Not recognizing the tall, lanky figure in hiking clothes and backpack, Jenkins dismissed him and kept going, assuming he was just some local walking home. As they moved past the last few houses between the crossroads and the lonely stretches of road ahead, Monroe picked up his pace, gradually gaining on him, moving silently until he was almost on top of his target.

Jenkins turned to toss his empty soda cup into the woods and finally noticed he was being stalked. He froze a moment; then, recognizing his pursuer, stood with a mocking smile and waved the half-eaten Slim Jim at Monroe.

“All the way out here in the boonies, really? Oh, yeah, I’m terrified. You’re the dork with all the hobbies Molly told me about, the one she dumped for me.”

Monroe let his eyes flash red. “That would be me. And right now, my favorite hobby is vivisection.”

Cocky, Travis took another bite of his Slim Jim. Chewing, he scoffed, “And what the hell’s that?”

“You’re going to find out.” Monroe _woged_ and snarled, “Run!”

Faced with a charging Blutbad, Jenkins dropped his snack and took off down the highway shoulder, the lighter and swifter Monroe closing in on him within a few strides. The Klaustreich ducked into the woods, seeking cover where he could _woge_ and fight back unobserved. He ran down a faint deer track between the dense trees and undergrowth, Monroe in hot pursuit, until a small clearing opened up about a mile in from the road.

Travis whirled and _woged_ just as Monroe burst through the trees into the clearing, shrugging off his backpack. Thinking to scare off the country Wesen with his street fighting skills, he lunged yowling at Monroe, a buzz saw of sharp teeth and claws, but his attacker never slowed for an instant.

Slammed backwards by 6’3” of enraged, fully fanged-out Blutbad, Travis lost his footing on the uneven ground before he could sink in his claws. He threw back his hands to break his fall, a rookie mistake – Monroe’s fierce talons tore at his neck and unprotected belly. By the time he hit the ground, those talons seized his right arm in a vise-like grip and ripped it from his body.

“You’ll never hurt Molly again! You’ll never hurt anyone again!” Monroe’s guttural voice roared over Travis’s agonized yell.

In shock, blood spurting from his shoulder socket, Travis struggled to sit up and take a deadly swipe at his attacker with his remaining arm, only to have Monroe seize that arm and fling him across the clearing to slam against the trunk of a tree. Monroe advanced on his hated enemy, bloodlust in his eyes, and started to go for Travis’s throat, then remembered his mother’s strategy – take the prey’s legs out, so it can’t get away. He stomped the Klaustreich’s kneecaps with his heavy boots, and when the groaning Travis tried to roll away, slashed his hamstring muscles.

Enjoying his victim’s cries of pain, Monroe kicked him over on his back, stepping on his left arm and breaking it. Desperate, frantic, Travis lurched up on his elbow and tried to sink his fangs into the Blutbad as Monroe bent low over his mangled body, but his attacker backhanded him to the ground, fist smashing Travis’s nose.

Still growling but taking his time now, Monroe ripped layers of jacket, sweater and shirt from the Klaustreich’s torso to the furred skin beneath. He sank his claws into Travis’s throat, holding him down, glaring into his yellow feline eyes, and proceeded to savage his guts out while he still lived before tearing his body to pieces.

He ate some; later he couldn’t remember clearly what parts but they were all from the abdominal cavity. The larger pieces he hauled deeper into the forest and buried in widely scattered places, covering them with layers of duff and rocks and fallen logs while ravens, their slumber disturbed, soared down to feast on the eyes and gut pile, watching him work.

Determined that no identifying teeth or prints could be found, he took the hands, feet and head to a thicket frequented by a family of feral swine, descendants of farm escapees well known to the local Blutbaden hunters. Signs of fresh rooting under the trees showed that they were near. Following their scent, he moved close to the enormous tusked hogs and tossed the body parts into their midst, then quickly climbed a tree out of their reach.

With grunts and squeals of delight, the huge sow and her nearly grown pigs fell on the unexpected bounty, crushing and gulping even the bones of the skull while Monroe watched, chest heaving, from the branches above. He memorized their markings and promised himself and them that he would never take them in a hunt, for favors received.

Once they moved on, satisfied there were no more treats to be had, he climbed down to strip and wash in a stream, then put on fresh clothes and boots from his pack. The blood soaked clothes and boots were buried separately a mile or so off the deer trail before he made his way back to the convenience store long after dark. The place was closed, gas pumps shut down, lights off. He strode past in his hunting jacket and pack, just one more late hiker heading down the remote highway after a long Saturday in the forest, cut through the trees to the car hidden in the Calico Graphics parking lot, and drove home.

His parents were sitting at the kitchen table when he came through the back door, Alice grading papers while Bart read his latest horology journal. Both looked up briefly then went back to what they were doing.

“You missed dinner,” his mother said, pointedly not asking where he’d been. “Leftovers are in the fridge.”

“I’m not hungry,” he said, giving them a dark and meaningful look before retreating to his bedroom and closing the door.

Bart sipped his drink and turned a page in his magazine. “He will be later. Klaustreich tastes like ass.”

“But ‘revenge is sweet, whatever the meat’,” Alice answered, quoting an old Blutbad adage. “I’m fixing him a plate.”

They didn’t bother lowering their voices, knowing Monroe would hear.

When he came out hours later, starving, she’d left a note on the kitchen table that dinner was waiting for him in the oven. And it was still warm.

 

Of course there was a police investigation because of the attack on Molly and her shocking injuries, but resources were scarce in those small towns and Travis Jenkins had let it be very publicly and derisively known long before that tragic day that he was leaving their boring little backwater villages as soon as he could and would never return to Halfmoon Lake. So it was no surprise when they came up empty.

The Hundjäger officers tracked him as far as Highway 28, where hours earlier Monroe had caught his airborne scent still lingering in the direction Travis had hitched a ride, but by then the scent trail along the highway was long dissipated. The Klaustreich had vanished down the road, most assumed toward Concord and the larger cities beyond. He had no car or credit cards to trace, no cell phone back in those days, and there weren’t many surveillance cameras around; and Monroe had been careful to keep himself and Alice’s car out of sight while stalking his prey.

There were plenty of people who wanted Jenkins caught or preferably dead, especially the Adlers and their extended family. Rewards were offered for any information leading to the fugitive’s capture but of course to no avail. And then – Monroe had no idea how his parents arranged it – the Adlers got anonymous word that the deed was done, but no clue who had done it.

Angela told Alice later they suspected the outraged and determined Hundjägers had pursued Jenkins on their own, off duty and perhaps calling on their kin in other law enforcement agencies, and dispensed Wesen justice when they found him. She said it gave them all a sense of peace knowing Molly’s abuser had not escaped to ruin the lives of any more girls and the people who loved them.

Monroe could feel the quiet pride and approval from his parents though not a word was ever said. Bart in particular seemed more at ease and comfortable with his son, as though Monroe had come through some secret Blutbad rite of passage with great honor.

And when he went off to college in Pennsylvania months later, he had come to terms with the sad truth that he had to make a new life for himself without Molly, who left his cards and letters unopened, refused his phone calls and any attempts to see her.

Bruno reluctantly came by the house in late August while Monroe was out washing his yellow Beetle in the driveway, preparing to pack his life up in it and make the long drive down to settle into his dorm. The younger Blutbad stopped unhappily by the car, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, holding a pack of Monroe’s unopened letters tied with string.

Ever aware of anyone stepping onto his territory, Monroe sensed his approach before he saw him. He straightened up to greet Molly’s youngest brother. “Bruno. How’s everyone…how’s Molly…?”

Bruno shook his head. “She sent me to give you these and said don’t try to contact her any more. I’m sorry, man. We all are.”

Monroe turned off the hose, dried his hands on his jeans and sadly accepted the rejected letters.

“We hoped she’d come around after the plastic surgery and all,” Bruno said. “But she said to tell you, she’s not going to ruin your life with the mess she made of hers and she’s not going to change her mind, so…she wants you to go on with yours.”

After a long moment, Monroe nodded mutely, then closed his eyes and shook his head.

Bruno had more sad news to tell him. “Mom and Dad are selling up and moving us all to Massachusetts. He found a new job there, fresh start and all that; getting Molly and the babies away from here, she can’t have any kind of normal life here after what happened.”

Monroe looked up in dismay. “Uprooting the whole family?”

“Yeah, well, you know, small town, everyone knows, and there’s the, well, stigma with those four _vorherrscher_ to raise. Even with the people who try to be kind and understanding, she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life as ‘poor Molly’ and her story being whispered to newcomers. Liesl and I’ll be packing off to college like you in a couple of years anyway, so…they decided this is best for everyone.”

He awkwardly gave Monroe’s shoulder a friendly punch. “I’m gonna miss hunting with you, dude.”

Monroe punched him back, nodding. “Me, too.” He gave a deep sigh of resignation. “Hope it works out for all of you. I’m really sorry.”

“Not your fault. We always thought….” Bruno stopped, then forged ahead. “We always thought you and Molly, well, you know, we’d all be family someday. That would’ve been cool.”

“You guys _are_ family. We’d do anything for you.” _Already have_ , he thought privately. “Mom’s going to be really sad…bet she already knows, she’s so close to your mom.” That would explain why Alice had been distracted and subdued lately.

“Probably. Everyone’ll know when the ‘for sale’ sign goes up.” He looked around at the familiar neighborhood, comfortable houses on their lush green lots nestled back against the forest. “It’s the only home we’ve ever known. We can be ourselves here – you know. I’m sure they’ll find someplace outside the city where we can still run, but it’s not the same as having pack to run with.”

“And your own territory. I’m going to have to deal with that somehow while I’m away at school.”

“You coming back here after you graduate?”

Monroe shrugged. “Not much to do here except go into the family clock business. I mean, I like it, but I can’t see spending the rest of my life as the junior partner until everyone else retires. My folks know that; they want me to try new things, find my own path, all that. I think they secretly hope after I’ve seen the world, so to speak, I’ll want to come back here and settle down. But, truth be told, I don’t think so.” _Not without Molly and all the dreams and plans we had._

“So – guess this is goodbye then,” Bruno said. “Hope it all works out for the best.”

They shook hands. “You, too, man. Give my…our love to everyone, okay?”

“Okay.” Bruno backed up a few steps, then turned and walked back down the driveway, hand raised in farewell. Monroe never saw any of the Adlers again.

When Bruno was out of sight and scent, Monroe looked sadly at the pack of letters, then realized there was a small envelope on top with nothing written on it. Inside was a handwritten note from Molly.

“Dear Monroe,

“Bruno will tell you we’re moving away. I’ve brought too much shame and heartbreak to my family for us to stay here. I’ve ruined my life and theirs. I won’t ruin yours, too.

“I know I hurt you horribly and there’s no excuse for the way I treated you, after everything we’ve been to each other all these years. I must have been insane, I still can’t understand how I lost myself in all this mess. But now I’ve got to live with my mistakes and have to raise these babies somehow, and try to learn to love them even though they remind me every moment of what happened to me and the dreams I’ve lost forever because of what I did.

“I’ll always love you, even though I don’t deserve your forgiveness or your love. My family, bless them forever, is doing everything they can to help me, at huge personal sacrifice, even leaving their lives here and moving us away.

“I’m determined not to burden your life with the tragedy I’ve brought on myself and them. The best thing you can do for me is to go have a wonderful life and find someone more worthy of your love.

“Please don’t try to find me or contact me any more. It will only break my heart again.

“Love, Molly.”

He burned his letters in his campfire on the last solitary night he spent in their local forest before he left for college. Molly’s letter he would keep forever, tucked away in a carved wooden box with her pictures from their childhood and teen years, and that awkward junior-senior dance. He would do his best to remember her that way, and try to keep from thinking of her much at all. It took many years and a lot of life experience for that to happen.

 

_September 2014._ _Rosalee drifted in and out of shallow sleep, aware when Monroe went rigid with tension, struggling through his painful memories, sometimes trembled, sometimes thrashed and growled, lost in his cathartic inward process._

_It was as if he were lost in nightmares he couldn’t wake from, or a kind of self-induced trance. From time to time he sighed deeply, feeling and letting go of intense emotions. Several times tears streamed past his temples and into his beard, and he clenched her hand hard where he still held it on his chest._

_She knew better than to disturb him. This was his private journey, one he needed to make to free himself from the power of the past and regrets over what might have been. All she could do was be a comforting presence beside him._

In the last dark hour before dawn, the tears and the trembling subsided. He took long calming breaths to release the last of the sadness and pain and to welcome the peace of acceptance.

Aware now of the heavy rain falling outside their bedroom windows, a soothing, cleansing sound, he completed his deep meditation on life-altering errors made and paths not taken, and concluded he would not change his life as it was now. He embraced it freely, not as an accident of fate or settling for less than what might have been.

He wished the people hurt along the way hadn’t suffered as they did, and at last truly accepted that in most cases, he was not the cause of their pain, not responsible for their choices. That he had tried the best he knew how at the time to help them and to be a good person, by the standards of his kind.

That he alone was responsible for losing it so completely with Angelina, throwing away the life that he, and his parents, had envisioned for him; how their dreams and expectations for their only surviving child had been so utterly dashed with Monroe moving so far away and later embracing by necessity his wieder lifestyle, alienated from them and the ways of their people that they cherished, that sustained them…including his determination to marry his Fuchsbau beloved.

He felt anew his deep upwelling of love and gratitude that they had come to accept her as their daughter-in-law, whatever reservations they still had about the mixed-species marriage and its risk to future grandchildren, if any were to be.

He accepted that he had willingly followed the call of the wild with Angelina to such extremes, in denial of the nearly certain consequences. She hadn’t seduced him into it, he had embraced it after too many years suppressing his Blutbad nature to get through college and grad school and establish himself here in Portland, far from his Halfmoon Lake home town forever infused with memories of Molly and the restrictions of everyone’s expectations for him.

He’d settled here and become successful, but lonely…more lonely than he knew. The Lassers, charismatic and dysfunctional as they were, Angelina most of all, had become his second family for those chaotic years; caught up in their impulsive and exciting sense of dangerous fun and his lusty infatuation with the wild and beautiful Angelina, he’d nearly lost everything in the end – his home, his business, his health, his freedom and possibly his life if they’d ever been captured and imprisoned for some of the things they’d done, including the ones he couldn’t even remember, lost in the grip of the _Umkippen_.

For the death of Travis Jenkins, he felt no remorse at all.

But he was also responsible for committing to the agonizingly difficult path back to sanity and stability through the wieder program that became his lifeline, his daily, hourly, sometimes moment-to-moment salvation from lapsing back into the out-of-control monster that he’d become. He acknowledged how hard it was to sacrifice ever again doing so many things he’d loved to build a new and very different, strictly controlled way of life and learn to find his meaning and pleasures within its limits. He gave silent thanks to everyone in the program who’d helped him along the way and helped him still, and for the gift of being able to help them, too.

And now he had an astonishing new life, filled with friendships and challenges he could never have imagined since the fateful day a Grimm tackled him through his own front door, falsely accusing him of kidnapping a little girl. Despite the centuries of tradition, horrific wrongs done by both Grimms and Wesen, he felt renewed purpose in his life, channeling his Wesen knowledge and spirit into this weird ongoing quest for safety and justice obscured from the Kehrseiten world.

Opening his eyes in the first faint gray light of dawn, he realized that at last he was complete with it. Not that he’d never think of these things again, but he had followed the threads all the way through to the best of his remembrance and imagining and arrived with peaceful contentment where he lay now, in his Portland bungalow listening to the rain and the gentle breathing of his cherished wife beside him.

He turned his head on the pillow and pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. Rosalee stirred from her light sleep and opened her beautiful brown eyes, filled with concern for him.

“You all right?” she murmured, and he told her, “Yeah, I will be. Just need some time.”

She slid her arms around him and snuggled closer, laying her head on his shoulder. He rested his chin on her silky hair and felt her nuzzle into his neck, breathing in his comforting scent.

“And sleep,” she whispered, lips moving against his skin.

“And sleep.” He kissed the top of her head and settled in, letting go of his thoughts as the rain lulled him into deep restorative slumber.

 

Monroe woke to cloud-filtered daylight hours later. Rosalee was up and gone; she’d left a note on her pillow. “Early house call, then shop. Wanted to let you sleep. Call me later.” It was signed with an “R” encircled by a heart.

Feeling strange but grounded, he wrapped himself in the comfort of his old plaid robe and went downstairs. She’d left a bowl of fresh cut fruit in the fridge for him and the French press set up for coffee, just needing a pour of hot water. _The Oregonian_ lay folded on the counter beside it.

He cut a piece of last night’s quiche for breakfast, warming it in the toaster oven while he made coffee and skimmed the newspaper. His cell phone was uncharacteristically silent, for which he was exceedingly grateful.

After eating and leafing through the paper, he poured a second cup of coffee and called Rosalee.

She answered on the second ring. “How’re you feeling?”

“Kind of drained and tired, but okay. We can talk about it when you get home. And so far, it’s been a blessedly Grimmless day.”

She chuckled into the phone. “Here, too…knock on wood.” She rapped her knuckles on the countertop.

Monroe echoed her on the dinette table. “No kidding.”

“How about I bring home Greek for dinner? That new café the Genio Innocuo family opened on Fourth and Davis is really good; I met Juliette for lunch there last week. I kind of expect neither of us wants to cook tonight.”

“They do good vegetarian?”

“They do, I sampled. Your usual, then?”

“Sure.” He was grateful to be relieved of coming up with a dinner menu, then cooking it, a task he normally enjoyed.

“Greek it is. I need to get back to work, but…you having coffee now?”

“Yeah, second cup. I might need more to make it through the day.”

“Okay, then, a toast – to a Grimmless day!” She clinked her phone with the rim of her cup and he chuckled and clinked his against his blue mug.

“To a Grimmless day.”

“Oops, customer, gotta go. Love you, see you tonight!”

“Love you, too.”

Feeling unusually calm, he cleaned the kitchen after breakfast and did his hour of Pilates, then took a shower that cleansed more than his body. With classic cello concertos playing in the background, he lost himself in the peaceful focus of work for the rest of the day.

Rosalee came home with the promised Greek takeout for dinner, and they enjoyed it with casual conversation. When they were through, Monroe picked up their wine glasses and led her to the comfortable old yellow living room couch. She followed him, wondering what was up and bringing the bottle of wine.

They settled close together where they’d sat last night, and Monroe picked up his mother’s letter. Rosalee regarded it with apprehension and curiosity. He took the green pages out of the envelope and handed them to her.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “I’m okay now. We’re all okay.”

Rosalee skimmed the first several pages full of family news and gossip, then slowed and read the final paragraphs carefully.

“You’d asked me a long while back if I knew whatever became of Molly,” Alice had written, “and I admitted I’d lost contact with the Adlers a year or so after they moved. We all meant to stay in touch, but you know how it is, everyone’s busy living their lives and time goes by. You were away in college by then, all involved with your studies and music, making new friends. At the time you seemed happy.

“But I started thinking of them recently, not sure why, and decided I’d try to find them and ask how they were doing. Their phone number had changed and the card I sent came back ‘addressee unknown’, but we have the Internet now. I located Karl through his business and sent him an e-mail with my cell number, asking if they’d like to get in touch.

“Angela called me the next evening and we had a nice long chat, catching up on everybody and what we’re all doing now. They’re settled in central Massachusetts, the kids scattered from Boston to upstate New York, two of them all the way out in Seattle. Most of them are married; she has six grandchildren now and more to come…not counting the four _vorherrscher_.

“Of course they tried to help Molly raise the wretched creatures the best they could, for all the good it did; they took after their father and turned out like their kind usually do. One’s in prison; one had genetic issues and died in childhood. Another ran away from home at sixteen; they haven’t heard from him since. The daughter’s stuck trying to raise a litter of her own alone.  The father abandoned her soon as he found out she was pregnant and determined to keep her babies, as males of their kind often do. Other than accepting money for the children’s care, she wants nothing to do with her mother’s family.

“On a brighter note, Molly’s married and has two children with her husband, who’s one of us. He’s former military, an electrical engineer; she’s the librarian at her children’s school. Angela says they seem quite happy.

“I told her you’re also happily married now, and that we all send our love and best wishes to them and especially Molly; she was like part of our family growing up. I thought that was the most sensitive way I could say it given what happened. So all’s ended as well as it could under the circumstances.”

The letter closed with Alice urging Monroe to call more often and sending him and Rosalee their love.

She sat quietly staring down at the letter, tears welling in her eyes at the thought of so much pain and sacrifice by Molly and her family, only to have the surviving children grow up to reject their mother and her family. She knew only too well what Alice meant by “genetic issues” leading to the early death of one, especially for a canid/non-canid Wesen cross.

And those children had to feel the stigma of being unwanted, fatherless, different, no matter how hard the Adlers had tried to nurture them as their own, and as _vorherrscher_ , pariahs to large segments of the Wesen community.

The tears spilled down her cheeks when she closed her eyes, and she gratefully accepted the handkerchief Monroe pressed into her hand.

“Poor Molly,” she sighed, dabbing her eyes. “To go through all that, raise them and have them reject her….”

“It’s not as if the Adlers could have put them up for adoption, either. No sane Wesen couple would want to go there and it’d be disastrous for unsuspecting Kehrseiten to take them. There was just no good solution.”

After thinking a long moment, Rosalee ventured cautiously, “If she’d been willing, would you have taken her back…married her?”

Monroe looked pained. “It wasn’t an option; she wouldn’t even see me or open my letters. But – honestly, no. How could I, with no way to support a sudden family of six? I couldn’t begin to give her everything she needed to deal with…everything. But I still felt guilty somehow. She was so special to me. And when she needed me, I tried, but I couldn’t protect her.”

“She wouldn’t let you,” Rosalee reminded him.

“Didn’t matter; I believed she was mine to protect, even when she didn’t want me any more.”

Rosalee folded the letter carefully and slipped it back into its envelope. At last she asked softly, “Are you still in love with her?”

“No! No. Not like that. I’ll always love who she was to me growing up, before everything went so wrong. That ‘silver box’ time, I think you called it. And it helps my heart that she’s happy now with someone who’s good to her, and made a new life. That’s a lot. That’s a gift. And that’s what I’ve finally come to accept after reading that letter. No more ‘what might have been’.”

He reached for her left hand and drew it to his lips, kissing her fingers next to her wedding ring. “Last night I came to know for certain that I want the life I have, exactly the way it’s unfolded. I examined every other path I could imagine that I might have taken, and they all paled before the life I have here and now, with you. You are my life, my everything, Rosalee. Never doubt it for a second.”

Her eyes were shining with unshed tears and love. “No regrets?”

“Only for the ones I’ve hurt along the way and can’t make amends. It’s that acceptance thing we talked about, that’s so hard, but…at last, I think I’m there.”

“Molly was not your fault. You did the very best thing you could for her – made sure the one who hurt her so badly didn’t get away and could never hurt anyone again.”

“Wesen justice. Though the human legal system wouldn’t see it that way.”

“Yeah. But sometimes it’s the only way. Nick’s had to come to terms with that one, too.”

“Who’d have thought our convoluted life paths would lead us to befriending, teaching and hunting with a Grimm?” Monroe shook his head at the wonder of it all.

“No way to see that coming. Well, here’s to wisdom and acceptance, may we all get there sooner rather than later.” She raised her wine glass and he clinked his with it.

“I will definitely drink to that.”

They sipped their wine, then Rosalee took his glass and set it on the table with hers. Sliding her arms up around his neck to draw him near, she smiled. “And seal it with a kiss.”

“Always happy to oblige.” He gathered her close and kissed her long and deep. A bit breathless when they drew back, he said, “You know, we still owe ourselves that honeymoon. If we don’t take it soon, it won’t be till our first anniversary.”

“Mmmm, how about we go upstairs and practice?” She gazed at him with bedroom eyes.

“Works for me.” Rising from the couch he swept her up into a bridal carry and headed for the stairs.


End file.
